The Dragon Conqueror
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: AU. Captured by a megalomaniacal warlord in China, Hiccup is forced to train dragons. The Dragon Conqueror wishes to become emperor of the world, crushing all hope with an invincible army. But Hiccup has plans of his own. Feared and regarded with suspicion, will Hiccup survive when he has the odds stacked against him, completely alone? SEQUEL TO THE DRAGON PIRATE
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer - I don't own How to Train your Dragon. I own this story only. **

**Yes! This is the sequel to _The Dragon Pirate _and the second story in a saga. In the last story, Wassa110 commented it was annoying I didn't upfront say the Dragon Pirate was just one story in a saga, though a Guest reviewer kindly said it made no difference, although I already knew that. Please give me constructive criticism - if you don't like my stories, don't read them. I am not forcing you. **

**Those who do like what I write, feel free to read, and please let me know what you think. **

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**The Dragon Conqueror.**

Every time Hiccup saw the Chinese dragons with his one good eye, he was reminded of the Whispering Death dragons of the Archipelago that he had seen. Whispering Deaths had not been the most common dragon which raided Berk, but when they had raided the village they had caused terrible devastation. And just as terrible injuries. Hiccup had seen how they had tunnelled their way through the village, wrecking homes and the food stores, which made them the most feared dragons in raids in a way the more dangerous breeds could not even begin to match.

But the Chinese dragons were vastly different from the dragons Hiccup had very rarely encountered. They were more snakelike than the dragons he'd seen during the senseless war fought in Viking waters. While they possessed wings like all dragons, they had four wings on their bodies which granted them an incredible level of aerial agility. Hiccup had seen how these dragons had darted through the air with incredible speed that even _**he **_had problems keeping up with them.

Hiccup immediately shoved those thoughts to the back of his brain, and he focused on the Chinese dragons in the cage, observing their strange features as though he had never seen them before, though they were all he had seen for months. They had weird whiskers which gave them a swarthy appearance which went along with their snake-like heads, but he wished that he had met them under better circumstances. He had encountered his own fair share of dragons over the years, but he had met unique species along the way.

Hiccup winced and he fought the urge to leap back in shock when one of the dragons, furious that they were still stuck in the caged enclosure, slammed its body against the stone-reinforced bars, the impact alone barely shaking the bars. The dragon let out a squawking cry of pain, but it quickly shrugged it off and flew higher and it joined its fellows in flying around the cage really fast.

As he stood back and watched the dragons - it wasn't easy with his only good eye left, but if he turned his head it wasn't so bad - he became lost in thought. Hiccup didn't blame the dragons for wanting to escape, but he was amazed at just how….eager (he couldn't find the right word to describe it properly) they were to be in the air, and he compared these dragons with the ones he had seen trapped in the Kill Rings on the islands inhabited by the Viking tribes. It had been extremely rare for the dragons to hover even a few feet above the ground in the arena on Berk, but Hiccup had never noticed it until now; he guessed back then, he had been more concerned with dodging and doing the barest minimum during the training program. But here, he had the time he needed to just stand back and watch as the dragons flew.

Their speed amazed him, and their eagerness shocked him, though he suspected that it had something to do with the enormous amount of energy these dragons contained in their bodies, they were forever moving at lightning speed, and Hiccup was really worried that one day, when he was not watching, one of the idiotic soldiers would come in, and make some stupid mistake that would set the dragons free.

He could not allow it.

Hiccup studied all of the dragons in the limited air-space of the enclosure, listening and wincing to their cries and roars of protests. The dragons had every right to hate the enclosure. The Dragon Conqueror had commissioned the construction of the enclosure to form a prison where dragons could be trained when he had heard stories of someone who could train dragons; Hiccup honestly could not imagine how long it had taken them, especially since the Chinese had followed the original Norse design for building their Kill Rings. Hiccup suspected the Chinese had used gunpowder to do most of the work, it was either that or they would still be working on the place through sheer brute strength and ignorance. Like the arenas Hiccup was familiar with, this place was essentially a hollowed-out bowl of rock with reinforced stone cages for the dragons while they topped the place off with a dome.

But while the place was similar to the Kill Ring he had known on Berk both as a trainee during the compulsory dragon training which was seen a rite of passage among Vikings and as Gobber's apprentice, Hiccup had noticed the number of ways this place was different, and his keen apprenticeship to Gobber (his heart still clenched at the thought of the one man who, looking back in hindsight, was more of a father than the _thing _who had spawned him, allowed him to see just how deep those comparisons were.

For instance the dome which topped the enclosure was much larger, more carefully as well as heavily constructed than the ones Hiccup had seen from the Viking tribes when he had levelled them to allow the imprisoned dragons to escape. The Chinese had really thought out their plans with the dome, with the jutting steel spikes the engineers had driven through the stone, topped by layers of reinforcement and a wire mesh to grant it with even greater strength, and although he hated what they were forcing him and the dragons to endure, Hiccup could not believe just how overboard they had gone, even if he could understand their aims.

Hiccup had been watching the dragons as they flew around their enclosure while he was leaning against the wall of the arena where he was out of their way; he had built a great deal of trust among all of the dragons. However, when he had first encountered the Chinese dragons when he had arrived in this part of the world, he had been taken by surprise by their belligerent attitudes, and while he had worked long and hard at building their trust, he had had problems with them.

But that was something he had expected when he had begun their training regimen. The most important part was to make sure the dragons were in the air.

It was their exercise workout, and although flying around and around in circle was hardly the ideal substitute for miles and miles of deserted air which they had been used to before the Dragon Conqueror's men captured them, it was the best they could do. Hiccup had not needed much to make sure the dragons got into the air, and they flew around every single day in order to burn some of that energy and make them succumb more to what he wanted them to do so then he was not risking life and limb. Hiccup had insisted on giving the dragons as much freedom as they could get, especially when he had been having problems with getting through to them.

When Hiccup had first begun training dragons, he had learnt that the best way to do it was to gain their trust. That was actually the easy part, the difficulty lay in getting close enough to them and risking life and limb with them. The dragons in the Kill Ring were easy, and logically Hiccup had imagined he'd have the same ease here.

Although he had nothing but contempt and disgust for their methods, he had thought taming the dragons and calming them down when they had been chained up when he had first come to this enclosure to train them would be easy, but no.

_The Dragon Conqueror _was not taking chances, he had issued orders for the dragons to be chained up at all times to make them susceptible to his 'trainer'' commands, thinking the dragons would learn to accept it.

Wrong.

Hiccup had lost count of the number of times he had nearly gotten himself killed when he had tried to get close to the dragons. He had nearly been slashed with the long and ultra-sharp talons, he had nearly been incinerated, impaled, poisoned, or gassed by the blasted by the dragons, and he had nearly been slashed by the razor-edged wings of a dragon he had named a Black Slash-Wing. That had been his own fault, really; he had gotten too close, but he had been so convinced at the time the dragon had calmed down enough for him to get close, but he had been wrong, and it had nearly cost him his life, but if he hadn't been watching the dragon closely then Hiccup knew he would have been torn into little bits.

After that little mishap, the Dragon Conqueror had lost some of the 'trust' he was putting into Hiccup ever training the dragons successfully for his purposes, though the former Viking dragon pirate knew better. With pressure from the Dragon Conqueror and his frustration in the conqueror's generals who would not leave him alone and did not realise if they tried to forcibly train the dragons, then they would almost certainly never make it out alive, Hiccup had begun watching the dragons and compared their behaviour to the dragons he was more familiar with.

Hiccup hid a smile when he remembered how he had nearly punched himself in the head and yelled curses at himself and his stupidity for not seeing it before when he had seen the answer was right in front of him.

The dragons were dangerous because they had so much energy that when he had tried to tame them all they wanted was to fly. Instead of telling the Dragon Conqueror what he had found out in case the arrogant Chinese warlord tried to take the law into his own hands, he had taken the chance and he had begun letting the dragons out into the air whereas before the Chinese had dragged them out in chains so then they would not try to lift off.

Unfortunately, being chained up had done nothing more than infuriate the dragons, but by letting them out and letting them fly without chains, he was burning some of their energy up and making them calm enough to let him get close enough to even touch them.

It had taken some doing, but when he had unchained the dragons and allowed them to fly, the dragons had flown around underneath the enclosure dome that had been constructed to keep the dragons locked up in the first place, though the Conqueror had known that his followers would need an air-space to fly. He just hadn't expected his trainer would take the law into his own hands, and let the dragons out into the dome's airspace so quickly, and all for exercise.

As they flew around their enclosure, Hiccup couldn't help but smile as he studied them. Dragons were incredibly majestic creatures, especially when they were in flight. The sky was where they transformed; all species of dragon were just as powerful on the ground as they were in the air, but in the sky, their limitations were practically nil.

Watching them from his vantage point, Hiccup studied them. Like in the Barbaric Archipelago, dragons were placed into a class system. There were the Earth, Land, Sea, and Fire classes. The Earth class dragons were the ones you were most likely to find in caves, caverns, or in forests and grasslands, although none of the so-called scholars of China had bothered to work out the reason behind why they lived there. It was the same with the Land class dragons, who were mostly seen around more greener pastures.

The Sea class dragons, however, were the most accurately named dragons. Like whales, they inhabited the oceans, and they never came close to land, but their power made them feared throughout Asia's waters. Hiccup had seen them spit out boiling water jets at those stupid enough to hunt them down, some of the jets appeared to be as long as a mile, although he was sure that it was an exaggeration on his part, although he had to admit he hadn't really hung around long enough to be positive. The Fire class were the most mysterious, they were mostly seen around the volcanoes of China, or in other hot regions. When Hiccup had first come to China and discovered the dragons indigenous to this part of Asia, he had gone out to study them.

Everything the Chinese thought they knew about dragons were wrong, no surprise there. They didn't realise that all of the dragons in China were as active and as capable of being everywhere barring living in the ocean whereas the Sea class dragons were like seals coming out of the water to spend time on the beach. By Viking standards all of the dragons in China would be classed as strike class, and so far he had not encountered any sign of a Queen, and there wasn't even a nest.

A cry caught his attention, and he looked upwards. It didn't take him long to find the source, even with his only remaining eye. The Burning Flame was trying to escape again, and he sighed with genuine pity.

Hiccup had seen dozens of these large dragons during his time in China. While they were snake-like in appearance, they were much larger than some of the dragons Hiccup had encountered during his youth. If he was to compare the Burning Flame species with the dragons back in the Archipelago, then he would almost certainly compare it to a cross between a Monstrous Nightmare and a Timberjack, but there were differences.

The Burning Flame, like all Asian dragons, possessed the same serpentine appearance and was a black-dark red in colour, and while its wings possessed the Timberjacks' razor-edged wings, it had the ability to bleed out its inner gases to spread around it, so when it sparked the gases anyone or anything unlucky enough to be caught out would be incinerated to death.

Hiccup had seen whole patches of forests being incinerated, especially when the Chinese hunted the Burning Flame down. The Burning Flames in the enclosure screeched, and they joined their fellow in attacking the enclosure dome. Hiccup craned his neck to look upwards, and he wasn't surprised when a few of the Burning Flames tied to escape by releasing some of their gases to melt the ironwork. The Chinese blacksmiths and engineers had known what they were doing when they had put this place together.

He didn't bother with trying to stop the Burning Flames. The dome was still stable, and thanks to the stonework placed up there, there was no chance the dragons could break through the dome. He also didn't react much when he saw a swarm of Hornet Spikes try to take advantage of the attack so they could escape as well. The Terrible Terror of the east, the Hornet Spikes were named after a particularly nasty insect with a powerful sting. The dragons were a dark yellow or a dark red in colour, with black stripes over soft but strong scales. Unique among dragons for the sting in their tails and their poisonous bites, Hiccup honestly wished that they were not among the dragons the Chinese had captured. More than once, he had almost been bitten or stung; he had seen people die from the injuries, and he didn't want to be one of them.

The good news was Hiccup generally showed positive results, which prevented the Dragon Conqueror from losing his temper and finding a painful and humiliating way of punishing him, which was something Hiccup honestly could not afford since he had a lot to do, and he had begun allowing Hiccup this freedom.

Hiccup watched nonchalantly as the dragons flew round and round the arena, happy that his dragon charges were enjoying their freedom, brief as it was, from their cages. He winced a few times as a few of the dragons bumped into one another. The space underneath the dome was finite and some of the dragons were quite long and they had the nasty habit of slapping some of their fellows as they tried to fly underneath the dome, far from the spikes.

Once again he was amazed, and impressed, by the dragons' intelligence.

_If only these idiots will actually bother to study dragons instead of trying to destroy them, _Hiccup thought sadly, _then again it's impossible. It seems as if both human and dragon are doomed to remain as enemies for all eternity. Still, at least the Chinese don't go all out with dragons like Vikings do, at least, not all the time. Odin only knows what would happen if that takes place. A war between human and dragon here could tear Asia to bits, no matter what the idiots here think. _

One of the dragons roared as it charged a certain part of the wall; Hiccup craned his head to look up, and he was not surprised when he saw a dragon the Chinese referred to as the Three-Headed Demon slam into the dome. The dragon, like all of the others in the enclosure, was serpentine in appearance, but it had three heads. In many ways, it was similar to the Hideous Zippleback breed Hiccup had known, only it had an extra head that made it appear longer than all the other dragons in the enclosure.

The Three-Headed Demon blasted white-hot flames at their targets, and with two extra heads, it was able to do much more damage. The breed's serpentine appearance was not entirely long; when he had been travelling through the country known as India, Hiccup had encountered snakes that were as thick as a tree branch, and killed by wrapping their bodies around their prey, and squeezing the life out of them. The Three-Headed Demon was reputedly said to do the same thing, but while it was a thick dragon in appearance, thicker than the others in girth, Hiccup still could not understand the slight humped back appearance the dragon had.

Hiccup had spent months studying these dragons when he had arrived in China. He had observed them from afar, and they couldn't be more different from the dragons he had known.

That the dragons in this part of the world did not seem to have any kind of need for a nest, or that type of community except with one another, though some dragons were much more solitary than others, was fascinating enough. Hiccup was just sad that these magnificent creatures had been slaughtered over the centuries while the Chinese people kept claiming they worshipped and revered dragons.

The sound of the slaps of tails smacking their fellows echoed through the enclosure, and there were quite a few of them, but Hiccup kept them up there so then they would be virtually exhausted by the time they came back down.

"Trainer!" a voice demanded, and Hiccup sighed under his breath, but he knew better than to ignore the foolish general who'd called for him, especially if he wanted to stick to his current agenda. He walked over to the gate where a man wearing a battledress was standing. The man had dark hair speckled with grey lines while his features were lined with years of stress which came from long years in armour and wielding weapons, with his long shoulder-length hair pulled back into a tight knot on top in the style Hiccup had never gotten the name of, stretching his skin and making his eyes more narrow than they were. The battledress he wore was indicative of his high status in the Dragon Conqueror's army, as the black armour plate he was wearing was decorated in delicate gold and silver filigree the figures of dragons, but dragons in their most frightening poses.

"General," Hiccup greeted, though there was no warmth between the two men.

"Why are you not training the beasts?" the General demanded, his almond-shaped eyes narrowing even more.

"I am waiting for them to wear themselves out," Hiccup replied without any feeling. He was bored with this interrogation since he had heard it so many times before. "I've told you and your Dragon Conqueror the dragons are high spirited and full of energy. They need to be exercised for a long period before I can even get close."

The General growled. "You are wasting time, trainer!" he snarled.

"How?" Hiccup challenged the soldier. "I've made a lot of progress recently."

"You are supposed to be getting the dragons ready to accept my soldiers as riders. Instead, you have not gotten that far!"

Hiccup didn't even bother to hide his long drawn out sigh of exasperation before he glared at the General with his eye. "Two of your men were nearly killed the last time," he pointed out, "I told you and the Dragon Conqueror, _five times_, the dragons still have trust issues. They trust me, but only to a point. If I am to properly train them, I will need time."

"You have had plenty of time! The Master does not like to be kept waiting!"

_Yeah, don't I know it? _Hiccup asked himself privately. Aloud he went on with explanation for why everything was just too painfully slow. "Listen, General," he began slowly and respectfully, knowing nothing good would come out of shouting at the arrogant soldier. "I am going to be training a Burning Flame soon enough, so please don't worry. Everything is under control."

That had the Generals' attention. "You are going to train a Burning Flame?" he repeated. "But…. I thought you were planning on training all the dragons at once?"

"No, that was your plan," Hiccup countered, "you and the Master forced me to train all of the dragons at once."

"So you are finally admitting you are a fake?" the General smiled in a smug manner. He had never liked Hiccup; it was bad enough for the General to accept criticism from a lowly foreigner, even if he was from the Norse lands although he did admire their attitude towards dragons. But the General had always been jealous of the way Hiccup had garnered favour from the Master when he had arrived and agreed after weeks and weeks of torture that he would give the Master the one thing he had always wanted. The world. He had always wanted the World, but he had lacked the means to get it.

While the General agreed the needed the Viking dragon trainer, in his mind he was prepared to finish the younger man off when he was no longer of any use. He had prepared for that moment, and it was one of the many thing he looked forward to.

Hiccup's nasal voice interrupted the General's not uncommon daydream of finally being rid of his rival. "No, I'm saying these dragons are full of energy, and while they have made great progress, I think the time has come for me to train them all one at a time."

"Do you believe such an act is necessary?"

Hiccup straightened up even while the General crashed to attention as an ornately robed man stepped into view. He was close to the General in terms of height, and while the robes hid his general physique which Hiccup believed was deliberate in order to lull his enemies or potential assassins into a false sense of security, the dragon rider knew only too well this man was strong, maybe close to Viking-strong. Hiccup could tell thanks to the size of the Dragon Conqueror's hands. They were unusually large, and they were scarred which showed that he was no stranger to pain, though what they had done over the years Hiccup honestly did not know.

The Dragon Conqueror's face was sleekly plump, but his face was starting to become wrinkled like the skin of an apple, and his mouth was covered by a neatly pointed beard that stretched down to his chest like a drawn dagger. While at the moment he was calm and seemingly approachable because of his current mild-mannered mood, Hiccup knew that the Dragon Conqueror was capable of throwing terrible rages that would see him destroy his chambers; more than once, Hiccup had seen the conquerors' violent mood swings, and as a result Hiccup had done his level best to keep out of the Dragon Conqueror's way.

Like all Chinese men, the Conqueror had his hair long and glossy dark, but unlike all the other men Hiccup had encountered, the Conqueror did not have his hair tied back really tightly so it stretched the facial skin until it looked like it was about to be torn off. No, he wore his hair long, although in keeping with tradition it was tied back though in a more looser style. Hiccup knew it was to separate himself from the rest of his subjects, but Hiccup had learnt enough about the man to know that underneath those robes were a number of weapons and antidotes to various poisons.

From what Hiccup had learnt about the reign of the Dragon Conqueror, just because he was a warlord meant nothing because to the rest of the people here, he was a beloved leader who cared for his people. Hiccup had often wondered just what kind of paranoid mind would make someone who had nothing to fear take so many precautions.

But the dark eyes of the Conqueror were always of interest to Hiccup.

Whenever the Conqueror spoke about his ambitions, his eyes, usually so calm and controlled even when he was angry, would develop a glint as if the ambitions, and those plans of conquest he held dear, were breaking through his control. Hiccup knew better than to underestimate him, he was more dangerous than Alvin the Treacherous.

"Yes, I do, master," Hiccup replied, mentally stabbing himself for calling the man that, but if his plans were to work then he would need to keep up the pretence even if he hated himself for it. "So far I've managed to gain some of the dragons' trust, which is important if you want to fly on them. But I want to take it up to the next level."

The Dragon Conqueror's eyes flickered past his general and the dragon trainer. Hiccup didn't need to look back to know the dragons were currently still flying about their enclosure. "I was under the impression you would be able to train them en-masse?" the warlord asked mildly, turning his face to once more look at Hiccup seriously. "Why the change in plan?"

"You have dozens of dragons in there," Hiccup replied slowly while he thought through his latest excuse, "I can teach them all at once, but to make them do that means I will need to focus on them individually. The only way I know how to do that is to do a bit of one-to-one training."

The Dragon Conqueror just stared back at Hiccup without giving any hint at all about what he was thinking, and the dragon rider honestly hoped the Conqueror would listen to him. Hiccup's good work in the compound had garnered him some favours from the overly ambitious warlord, but he knew better than to push his luck too far.

"I have learnt so much about the dragons in this enclosure thanks to my time here," Hiccup went on as he presented his case while he adopted his most persuasive tone, "and I cannot fault you for giving me the chance, Master," Hiccup had no problem dropping in a compliment here and there, "but I am so close to my goals. I am hoping within a month or two, your first soldiers will be able to fly on dragon backs. Give me a little more time, let me train the dragons one at a time, and then there will be success. Just think, this time in a month or two, and you will spread out across the world. Wouldn't it be better to have dragons that are properly trained, without flaws? If I train them like this, the way you want, then they could still be unstable. And dangerous!"

The General scoffed. "You expect us to believe that?" he sneered. "Our training methods-!"

"Are only good for human soldiers," Hiccup interrupted, knowing he was crossing a fine line while he focused his attention on the General, "but the dragons are not human. Humans do not have the ability to fly unaided; I watched as some of your _brave _trainers tried to bully the dragons into complying with them. Result; they were either killed by being torn to pieces, or burnt to death. What a _wonderful start," _Hiccup proclaimed sarcastically although he knew not to overdo it, "Humans do not have a mishmash of body weapons. Dragons do. Their natural body weapons make it too dangerous for your more…extreme methods. Like I said, if we went with your approach, you won't be conquering the world, you will be licking your injuries, and the master will not have dominion like he desires."

Hiccup turned to the Dragon Conqueror, and he saw that the man's mind was already made up. "Very well," the Conqueror said at last, his voice clipped and sharp while he gently but firmly planted a hand on the chest of the General to keep him silent. "We shall leave you now to begin."

XXX

_The village was incredibly peaceful to Hiccup; it was slightly larger than the types of places he had visited during his travels, and he had been to a few. As he tended to the rice crop with the rest of the farmers as a thank you to his current hosts but also so he could learn a new experience head-on, Hiccup had a few moments to reflect on the last few months. _

_He had been travelling in Asia for a good two years, five years after he had left the Barbaric Archipelago behind, just as he had left his time as the dreaded Dragon Pirate behind him. He had wanted to turn over a new leaf, although he had no intention of letting Astrid Hofferson get away with what she had done. In the past two years, he had learnt a great deal about this part of Midgard, and he had met many people over that time. _

_And he had also encountered many types of dragons, and he had also encountered a dragon similar to the Red Death who had been using its subjects to scavenge for food, with the same punishment for failure or defiance; death by being eaten themselves. _

_After he had arrived in China, he had travelled to as many villages as he could, preferably those with harbours so then he would appear to be a foreign traveller, especially since he had discovered although the Chinese people seemed to worship dragons to the point of using representations of them in their celebrations, they still hunted them down. With that in mind Hiccup had had no qualms about hiding Toothless although he refused to hide his skills with dragons, and he had begun taming a few of the dragons around in China, especially those who had been giving people problems, it was something he had become long since accustomed to over the years, and as he worked on the rice crops, he could not help but compare the worship the Chinese had towards dragons with the deference the Indians had towards tigers, and yet they still hunted them because of their power and danger. _

_In that regard the Chinese were better with their relationship than Vikings; with the Chinese, there was a lot of respect towards the dragons, and yet for the Vikings, they saw only demons. _

_Hiccup shifted his douli while he tended to the rice crops, and the conical hat shifted slightly on his head as he worked; like many things in this land, there were things he did not understand about some Chinese traditions, but he had been travelling a long enough time to accept traditions without asking questions about them, lest the natives became hostile. But truthfully he actually found the douli extremely comfortable on his head, and it stopped the sunlight from getting to his eyes. He had to admit the people in this village had accepted him much more quickly than the others he had encountered thus far. _

_It seemed, despite the numerous traders, travellers and explorers and merchants which came from the Viking part of the world, the reputation for brutality followed like a bad wind, but while that was true with some places, as soon as they learnt of his Viking heritage, they became nervous. But truthfully Hiccup had the feeling they were more concerned with the fact he stood out, though for many people that meant nothing to them. He had been accepted into this village easily enough, though truthfully deep down Hiccup had long since stopped caring about how people saw him. _

_When he was finished with the rice crops, he walked back with the others into the village and headed for the blacksmith shop. As he headed towards the shop, he overheard but didn't do more than give the giggling girls a warm smile. _

_He had experienced attention from girls for a while now, ever since he had had a growth spurt. That combined with several other changes to his body and his appearance, even though he had only one eye thanks to Alvin and the Outcasts, had certainly made him attractive. Hiccup didn't do more than spare girls a polite, warm smile. _

_A lot of things had changed for Hiccup over the years. He had lost his virginity to an Indian girl during his time there… and he had very nearly been castrated by her father when he had learnt what had happened, and as if that was not bad enough for Hiccup since he had escaped before he was due to depart anyway, he had found out the girl was pregnant but her father had tried to kill him instead of approaching him rationally. Hiccup had escaped from that mess, and he had not returned, so he did not know if the girl had given birth or not. Still he did feel bad about the whole mess, and he had sworn to try to be celibate on his travels. It had worked so far. _

_Ad he walked into the blacksmith shop, he couldn't help but smile when he saw the inside and compared it with the blacksmith shop he had worked in as a child. Instead of a rough and ready place which was dark and generally depressing, the Chinese version was larger, airy despite the smell of burning wood and coal. One of the biggest difference in this forge was the fact the Chinese forge was mostly built of stone, with only a few hints of wood in the construction. _

_After he said hello to a few of his friends, Hiccup grabbed some work and got started. He might have been a traveller, but some things never changed. _


	2. Chapter 2

The Dragon Conqueror.

Hiccup was having an extremely difficult time holding back the urge to laugh and cheer happily even though he needed to keep blinking his one remaining eye underneath his visor which he'd made to protect it from being damaged in any way while he was flying.

It was almost like a dream, but it was the reality of this mess.

He was flying again!

Okay, so he and the dragon he was currently riding was locked away in a second enclosure that was slightly larger than the one the Dragon Conqueror had set aside for the main training programs he wanted the captured dragons to go through and they were still prisoners, but the important thing was he was flying.

Hiccup routinely took a few of the dragons whom he had developed a bond without into this enclosure and flew on them for an hour or so in order to deepen the trust between himself and them.

It seemed to work. Not only had they become more amiable when he was around them, but it also had the effect of making a few of the other dragons jealous for the chance to fly unhindered by each other in the much more cramped 'training' enclosure; Hiccup had seen more than once during the different occasions he'd done this a few of the dragons in the other enclosure who were flying around to try to burn off some of the energy in their bodies in preparation for the rigours of the rest of the day to stop themselves from killing each other as well as himself some of the dragons actually clinging to the dome's bars that they could.

It wasn't his intention to make the dragons jealous of each other, and he did his best to fly on each of the ridable breeds he could so they got used to him, but the good part of this business was when it came to the actual taming work, they would know they would have an entire flying space to themselves which made the whole experience worthwhile.

Truthfully while he felt moderately guilty about making the dragons jealous of each other, particularly those whom he hadn't ridden yet, Hiccup was actually glad he had given something to make the dragons easier to train. Indeed, once he had brought one of the dragons in here shortly after he had come here after realising they needed to burn off their energy, they were far more amenable to him and his efforts.

The hard part was doing his best to avoid yelling out and cheering; he had done that before, and although he had gotten scolded by the General because his men had panicked, thinking that perhaps their precious dragon trainer was injured or something, and they had nearly gotten themselves killed because the soldiers who had made up the so-called _"rescue party" _been a bit too spear happy, and two were heavily injured as a result.

Hiccup hadn't become very popular among the Chinese soldiers that hung around the Dragon Conqueror as a result; none of the men was killed, but their injuries consisting of slash wounds and burns had put them out of action for a while, but unlike when he had lived on Berk, he genuinely did not care. He knew that although a few of the men would want to kill him, they wouldn't; they obeyed their general, who obeyed the Dragon Conqueror, who had made it a standing order not to harm Hiccup.

Still, he had needed to learn restraint while he flew the dragons as a result; while the same standing orders to keep him alive stood, the orders towards the dragons were even more harshly regulated, but accidents could still happen.

Hiccup held on as tightly as he could on the dragon's scaly hide. The Burning Flame's serpentine body made it virtually impossible for him to hold on tightly, and the dragons weren't quite yet fully trained yet to allow that one little smidgen of trust where it would accept the mounting of a saddle, which meant he had to hold on for dear life when it came to some of the dragons he had managed to get to this level of trust.

But he was still having problems holding back his cries of pleasure. It was just so _rare _for him to fly out like this, although truthfully he would only be cheering for the act itself although it would be marred by the fact he and the dragon would only be flying around and around in a circle. The second enclosure was right next to the smaller main dome where the dragons were kept imprisoned, and it covered a large stone-metal base which enclosed a small section of the nearby wood.

Hiccup was pleased the Dragon Conqueror had built this particular part of the compound and separated it from the main one to allow the dragons to fly with the soldiers so they'd get used to one another and become the kind of team Hiccup was with his own dragon.

As the dragon performed an upward U-turn, forcing Hiccup to cling onto the thick serpentine neck of the Burning Flame so he would still be hanging onto and not falling through the air, the dragon trainer caught sight of something on the ground which made him let out a sigh.

On the large platform which circled a small section of the enclosure was a small group of armoured soldiers. The sight of them made Hiccup just roll his eyes.

He knew why they were here.

They weren't standing on that platform to watch him. They were seeing what he could do on the dragons' so they could train and practice the moves themselves. Standing near them was the General. Hiccup wondered what the bastards' expression was.

Was he scowling?

Was he watching this whole scene enviously because Hiccup had the power he himself coveted?

Thinking of the Dragon Conqueror and the General made Hiccup frown. For the last few days, both men had been pushing for Hiccup to get to the stage where the dragons would be tame enough for others to ride them. Hiccup wasn't stupid; he knew the two men had different reasons for the tight time schedule.

Hiccup knew there was a major event the Conqueror himself was aiming for, and as time passed the warlord became more and more agitated as though he expected his soldiers to become dragon riders at the last minute.

But the General….

Hiccup had no doubt in his mind the soldier had his own plans for the dragons, plans that were different from those of his lord and master. It didn't take a genius to see what the general had in mind, and if those plans were benevolent, then Hiccup would tear out his one good eye. Hiccup decided that he was just going to keep on flying the Burning Flame around for a little bit longer and then he would take the dragon back to the pens to waste time deliberately so then he would put off the impending meeting with the soldier.

In the end, when he took the dragon back, the Burning Flame's energy was now much lower than it had been before. As he mentally prepared himself for the training session ahead of him while he walked over to the buckets of fish he had prepared for the session, Hiccup wondered how this would go. He had spent weeks and weeks trying to learn more about the Chinese dragon breeds, trying to find a way of training them without being cooked in his own clothes. But while he had told the General and the Conqueror only a few hours ago when they had again confronted him with the same boring rhetoric about not going fast enough, he had made a lot of progress…progress in carrying out some basic training on a few of the dragons, but only a select few so then he would make mistakes to help him develop the lessons he would need for all of them.

Not for the first time, he cursed the Chinese need to rush things, but he decided to throw them a bone just for now. Hiccup reached into the first bucket and without a flinch at just how slimy the fish inside was, and he slowly pulled out two fish by their tails. One of the smaller dragons snapped its jaws really close to where he was standing, but Hiccup firmly pushed the food down and held up a finger.

"No," he said sternly, hating the fact that he even needed to do this since all the dragons were a little bit hungry, but he knew he had to be firm with them. He had learnt that much after all the time he had been here in China. It didn't help the dragons he was dealing with were high spirit, lethally dangerous bags of pure energy. None of them was hesitant about showing off their talons, or whatever. And they never hesitated to lash out at one another when another dragon did something they didn't like. How many times had he had to punish the other dragons when one of them had pushed too far, much as this one had?

The dragon screeched a little bit, but another dragon lashed out of a bit when it sensed the danger of a mass punishment, even nipping the first dragon's neck, making it rear back, mewling with a wide-open mouth as it looked at the second dragon with something like an apologetic glance, but he had never been sure.

Hiccup decided that he wasn't in the mood to punish the dragons for today, but if it happened again then he would make sure they wouldn't get their favourite foods - something else which had taken him a while to learn about and force them to train whether or not they liked it. For the next twenty minutes, Hiccup threw the fishes into the sky, watching as the dragons flew up at once and grabbed hold of them before they chewed down on them and swallowed. Some of the dragons got more than others, but Hiccup always had a few extra buckets on standby in case there were a few greedy dragons.

He was just relieved he wasn't giving them their breakfast. Once he was sure all the dragons had been fed, he got down to basics. He grabbed another bucket of fish he had prepared earlier and he went back out into the arena, stopping more than a few of the dragons from going for the bucket, and he went over to a few of the dragons, starting with the one who had snapped its jaws close to him. The dragon watched him slowly with anticipation as it figured out what he was about to do.

Likewise, the other dragons were looking on, their eyes watching the bucket of fish, but the dragons that Hiccup was bonded with already had Hiccup approached the dragon slowly, using all the confidence he had gleaned over the years that he'd worked with the dragons, which had only been honed recently. This was the first time he had ever won the trust of a dragon with the others around, all the dragons he had so far bonded with, like the Burning Flame, had been done solo. But this little experiment was critical; if he could bond with a few of the dragons in the enclosure, it would inspire the others to want to develop the same trust with him, and they'd cooperate with him a lot better than they were already though compared to what they'd been like beforehand, nowadays they were better.

_I hope this goes well, _Hiccup thought to himself as he approached the dragon, and he dug down into the bucket and pulled out one fish and was reaching out with it.

"It's okay," Hiccup said gently to the dragon, as he got closer… "It's okay-"

"TRAINER!"

Startled by the bark from the General, Hiccup dropped the bucket instantly. It clanged when it hit the ground, and reacting to the sound, the dragons took to the air, screeching and Hiccup had to drop to the ground to avoid some of their sharp wing-blades.

Hiccup swung around angrily when he'd recovered his breath. "You moron!" he yelled, and he strode close to the soldier. "You must have seen that I was in the middle of creating a bond with the dragon, now you've ruined it!"

The General's lip was curled as he absorbed the insults. "Speak to me like that again, _**slave," **_he hissed angrily, "and I will have you flogged!"

But to Hiccup the threat only made him more reckless and angry. "You and your _**master **_have been badgering me to make the dragons trainable," he snarled. "I can't do that if you are just going to interfere and get in my way."

Hiccup let the General take that in while he tried to calm himself down. He needed to remain calm. There was simply too much at stake, and if he pushed the General then there was no telling what the Conqueror would do. "What do you want?" he asked.

But the soldier took out his knife and placed it close to Hiccup's jugular vein. "Speak to me in that manner again, and you will pay," he warned before he slipped the dagger back. "My lord wishes to speak to you."

Hiccup had raised an eyebrow at the threat while he just gave the man the lazy eye, knowing it was hopeless. Without him, they would have no chance of conquering anything, and they knew it. Sure, it was possible somewhere out there there was someone who was looking past the dragon's reputation in this country and was trying to tame one to train, but the Conqueror knew he was the only one who could do it. "What does he want?" he asked.

"Speak respectfully of your betters, _Trainer," _the General spat. "I do not know what he wants of you, but you will come with me now."

Hiccup sighed and nodded and just walked ahead of the General, deciding not to get into an argument just yet. He almost rolled his one good eye when the General let out an angry yell, and grabbed and forced him to walk behind. It was a petty move designed to remind Hiccup of who was in charge, but the dragon rider didn't really care. He was silent as they made the journey towards the Dragon Conqueror's palace. As they approached, Hiccup had to hold back the urge to sneer.

When he had travelled across China for the first time, he had seen the grand city of the Chinese Emperor. The palace there had been grand and built on a level that was radically different from those he had seen of the Romans; in Rome, the city had just blocks compared to what the Chinese had constructed. The Romans had grand buildings for sure, but the Chinese relied on natural materials just like the Vikings did. They used timber and earth for their buildings while they used pitched roofs made with strong and heavy tiles to provide stability.

But the Dragon Conqueror had commissioned a palace virtually identical to that of the Emperor himself, though Hiccup doubted the Emperor would be impressed by the size. The palace in the capital city had been massive, though Hiccup had been watching it from the air, yet it was still large enough to make an impression. But this place… Hiccup had little experience with palaces, but this place was not only much bigger, but it looked more like a fortress and against the rest of the small city the Conqueror had built, it looked dark and sinister.

Hiccup remained silent until they were inside the throne room. The Conqueror was currently having a discussion with a figure wearing dark robes that had a more coarser appearance suggesting they weren't anyone really important socially, but the Conqueror was speaking to him as though he were someone of importance. Hiccup mentally shrugged and decided it meant nothing to him.

The Conqueror's eye flickered to the approaching duo. He turned back to the figure and dismissed him, and with a bow, the other man left while the Conqueror returned to his throne and sat on it while he looked at Hiccup.

"I am losing my patience with you," he said quietly, his voice though smooth was harsh. "I have given you every concession, but now my patience is wearing thin. None of the reports I have seen has shown any headway despite you managing to tame a few of the dragons. Where are my soldiers in the enclosure? Why are you not allowing them inside?"

Although he wanted nothing more than to look at the Generals' face to see how he felt about his master referring to the soldiers as his masters, Hiccup knew he had to remain focused on this. "I was about to train another dragon today, master," he said, wishing he could use magic on the last word so he could crush the Dragon Conquerors head into pulp, "but the General interfered."

"That is not true!" the General was instantly defensive but Hiccup refused to back down from this one.

"Didn't you see what I was doing with the dragon?" Hiccup snapped in the Generals' face, just daring him to _**try **_to carry out his threat in full view of his master, but he knew the General wouldn't. "I was trying to tame it, to make it trust me. And that," he swung his head around to look at the Conqueror, "is why I am taking things so slowly. The dragons are very slow to trust, but the more time I have with them, the easier it will be for me to help teach your soldiers how to ride them. If I make them fly the dragons now, I don't know what will happen. The only reason the dragons are more welcoming to me than they are to you is that _I am not like you. _I just need a bit of time without being harassed every minute of every day, and watched," he added, sending his darkest one-eyed look at the General, who was visibly seething, "and I can do it for you."

The Dragon Conqueror shook his head. "You have been saying that for days," he countered. "In any case, the General whom you have just insulted and I have had a consultation. I agree you have not been training the dragons in anything new for too long. You are wasting time. That will change. Today, you will train a dragon to be ridden by one of the soldiers. General," the Conqueror looked at his 'faithful and trusted underling,' "have you selected a soldier?"

With a superior smirk sent at Hiccup, the General stepped forward and bowed. "I have, lord," he replied.

"Good," the Dragon Conqueror replied, not wanting to hear of the details. He took in Hiccup and shook his head in disgust. Weeks and weeks of waiting in anticipation, and there was nothing to show for any of it. Maybe the General was right, maybe they should be forcing the dragons to do as they were told by forcibly training them as they had trained livestock. "Make preparations."

Waved away by a careless hand, the General escorted Hiccup back to the enclosure and leaned in. "You should have done your job, _Dragon trainer," _he sneered, but Hiccup wasn't listening. He would need to work quite quickly if his plans were to be realised.

XXX

Meanwhile, the Dragon Conqueror was seething quietly in his throne room while he watched Hiccup and his General leave. For weeks now he had been promised by the dragon rider whom he'd had captured from that crumbling little village he would have the army he had wanted for a long time ever since he'd heard of the miracle of dragon-riding.

The Conqueror leaned back in his throne and thought of that day. For a long time, he had been ambitious and he had long since wanted to take control of the throne of China.

For a long time, he had been nothing more than just another feudal lord in China, although a low ranking one. But that did not mean he lacked vision. He had once been a professional general in the army himself, but he had been awarded a position of power. To him, power was essential if you wanted to live. It was either rule or be ruled, and he had no intention of spending the rest of his life in servitude to the Emperor.

His duties were formidable, but that didn't mean he lacked ambition.

After all, had not the first emperor himself fought long and hard to unite the lands and provinces of their great country? But the Dragon Conqueror had no intention of repeating history. What would be the point? In any case, the emperor would not allow it. He had control of the army, while the Conqueror himself only had a small band by comparison even though his men were extremely well trained according to current standards. Yes they were well-armed and they were well equipped and trained, but that was not enough. They - he - needed power, a new edge.

Yes, they could have pioneered the creation of new war-machines, but there was no point there either.

No, they needed something else.

The dragon rider known as Hiccup had that power. He had the means to ride a dragon, to train them and to use them as a weapon. He had heard reports and stories that he was convinced had a grain of truth to them that he had used his own dragon, a strange but incredibly powerful black dragon that was reportedly extremely fast and capable of incredible miracles, to fight against armies or trappers that travelled around the country like the marauders they were.

When he had first learnt about Hiccup and that he was in the country, at first the Dragon Conqueror believed it was a total lie. Indeed, when he had learnt that Hiccup hailed from the lands of the marauding Norsemen who were well known and legendary for their own hatred of dragons, the Conqueror had just been given yet another reason to believe it was a lie. So he had dismissed everything he had heard as pure conjecture.

But then he had seen the Dragon Rider in action.

Despite his earlier dismissals of there being a man out there capable of riding a dragon, he had still been interested because after the first story it had never stopped. Stories of the rider visiting villages, sometimes even rescuing dragons who had been trapped by hunters, continued to circulate. And the more stories that reached his ears only made him begin to wonder if it was true. With that in mind, the man who would become the Dragon Conqueror, who was just another lord, went out and investigated the rumours with a small party of his soldiers. Together they had travelled to the places where the rumours were at their strongest. It didn't take long before they learnt they were not rumours.

In the end, he and his men had tried to trap a dragon to learn how to handle the art as part of practice for the real thing, only to be attacked. And then he had seen this strange black dragon, which looked so different from the dragons he had seen all his life, either in pens or in the sky before they were killed, and although his instinct to kill the dragon which had been forged a long time told him to take a weapon and find a way to slaughter the beast, his reason told him to watch.

The power.

Oh, the power of the dragon-!

It had been incredible. He had raced home, his mind fixed on what he had just seen.

Dragons, dragons were the key to gaining incredible, unlimited power. With their ability to fly unchecked, to breathe fire or flick poisonous spines, his army would be invincible. He had made preparations, ordered the construction and the design of enclosures where the dragons could be contained and trained. But it was virtually impossible to train them. The Conqueror's original plan was to train the dragons on their own without Hiccup's help because why should he help? He could trick them or betray them. But no matter what they did, it was impossible to train the dragons. So many who tried ended up dead, the dragons were too vicious. In the end, the Conqueror had conceded defeat. He had taken his time, planned for the capture of Hiccup and his dragon, and force them to train his new army. The dragon had escaped, but that was nothing in the long term. They had Hiccup.

Yes, he had been stubborn, as all Vikings were - it still amazed him that a Viking had trained a dragon - but in the end, after being tortured so badly while he had watched so then his men didn't make the mistake of permanently blinding Hiccup (how he had lost that eye, the Conqueror did not know), Hiccup had conceded.

But that was ages ago.

Yes, Hiccup had made formidable progress. He had found ways using his own expertise and experience with dragon training to learn how to properly control the dragons locked up in the enclosure. His men had watched, familiarising themselves with Hiccup's skill so when the dragon trainer became expendable, his men would be able to take over. But that was impossible because while his men were picking up bits of the skills needed, Hiccup had yet to allow them anywhere near the dragons. Hiccup claimed it was the dragons innate distrust of people from their ilk, but the General claimed it was not true.

The Conqueror had no idea whom to believe, but at the moment he did not care. Time was running out and his patience was far from infinite. His men would learn how to train and how to ride dragons.

XXX

_Hiccup chuckled as Toothless nudged him again. "No, bud," he chided, "I want to try to finish this section of your new tail-fin." _

_Toothless just nudged him again, though gently because he knew how his rider and friend felt about having his tools knocked to the ground. Hiccup sighed as he felt the nudge. He had waited for months to experiment with his new tail-fin technology, making one prototype after another for himself and Toothless to experiment with, and while Hiccup was becoming more and more certain he was refining his ideas each time, he couldn't help but experiment. _

_One of the biggest headaches he had with the work was the fact the prosthetic Toothless wore more commonly needed a lot of maintenance. The tail-fin that Toothless could use by himself would probably require twice as much because of the complexity. Hiccup had spent years trying to refine the original design to keep the complex needs of the tail-fin which would work without a rider but would require less maintenance. He had experimented with different prototypes, learning from each mistake as he had gone. _

_When he felt Toothless nudge him again, warbling with draconian laughter, Hiccup sighed again. "Alright," he relented, putting down the tools he had in this cave complete with blacksmithing tools he had either fabricated himself or ha stolen or borrowed from other blacksmiths. Getting the rest of the materials wasn't that tricky, well not always. _

_Toothless jumped around for a minute, excited, but he sat still as Hiccup placed the saddle on his back and patiently remained as still as possible while Hiccup fastened the saddle up before he went for the tail-fin. Hiccup went as slowly as he could, and Toothless seemed to have worked this out because he warbled and grumbled impatiently. _

"_Don't be like that," Hiccup chided his dragon. "You are the one who disturbed my work. Now I will do the same to you." _

_Toothless grumbled. _

_When Hiccup was ready, he clambered onto his dragons' back before Toothless kicked off. Hiccup looked out into the sky. He was thankful that he and Toothless had these moments together during the night and the early morning so no-one really saw them. To the rest of the village, he was just a foreigner, someone who was exploring by sea. He had offered them a few bits from dragons in order to prove he was trustworthy though the bonus had come from that medallion he had from the Buddhist monastery only a few miles off, where he had visited and studied for a bit under their abbot, and it had paid off. They had let him into their village, and he had earned his keep by offering his blacksmithing services and his help on the rice crops. _

_He just wished that he could show Toothless off, but all of his instincts told him it was not a good move. _

_The prejudice here towards dragons didn't disturb him, he had experienced it his entire life when he had been living on Berk. But it disturbed him that they had an almost religious fanaticism towards dragons, unlike the Vikings who only saw the dragons as emotionless demons hungry for their food, the Chinese openly revered them and yet they saw it as their religious duty to kill as many dragons as they could. _

_Hiccup was shaken out of his thoughts when he and Toothless suddenly heard a shrieking noise. Hiccup sensed Toothless tensing up. He patted the dragon gently on the head. "I know, bud," he said gently as he guided his dragon towards the sound instantly, "its a dragon."_

_Toothless warbled worriedly, not truly pleased that his rider was guiding them towards a dragon. The Night Fury could tell that this dragon was in pain. The dragons here may have been strange, but some things were constant. But he knew why his rider was heading towards the dragon. They had both learnt the people in this place saw nothing wrong with killing dragons and trapping them. Old habits died hard, they both remembered how they had rescued dozens of dragons back in the archipelago, so there was nothing new here. _

_When they got there they weren't surprised to find the dragon in a thick mesh net with fires blazing from torches, with the trappers around the massive creature, which was thrashing and trying desperately to escape while they pinned the netting to the ground with strong bolts. Once or twice the dragon thrashed its tail around, and each time the trappers would nail down more bolts through the net to leave the dragon a small amount of space to move. _

_Hiccup was familiar with the practice, the Chinese would cram the dragon into a tight space and then they would have someone with a spear mount it, and then they would impale the poor creature. _

_It never failed to disgust him just how evil his own race was, after years of hearing how evil __**dragons **__were, and yet you looked at this and it made you think. Hiccup's face darkened and he pointed Toothless towards the ground, and his dragon went down in a dive, shrieking as he went while firing a plasma blast at the trappers, sending them off scurrying in all directions. _

_As he pulled Toothless upwards, Hiccup leaned in and whispered into the dragon's ear. The dragon warbled in displeasure, but he grunted and landed Hiccup on the ground, with Hiccup taking out the automatic crossbow he'd invented with its clips of small bolts. He took a few extras just in case, and a short sword. He had fashioned this particular weapon in China, after gaining access to their superior sword making knowledge, and the result was a short sword that was as robust as the Viking version and as well made a Chinese sword. _

_Hiccup leapt into the fray, and he fired his crossbow at the trappers before he slashed at them with his sword. The trappers were taken by surprise by his appearance, and it cost a large number of them their lives. Within two minutes of his arrival, Hiccup had already killed seven of the trappers, and their bodies were covered with little bolts from his crossbow. _

_While he threw himself at the trappers, momentarily thinking of Stoick would be crying tears of joy of how well he was fighting, Hiccup knew that it wouldn't last. Fortunately, with Toothless above providing aerial cover while he drove most of the trappers away, Hiccup was able to fight them before some of them regrouped and came after him, but once again Toothless proved a godsend. He saw what was happening, and he attacked. _

_It took the duo a good few minutes to get rid of the gang, but they were driven off. Hiccup and Toothless were left with the dangerous and tricky task of freeing the dragon. The creature had been agitated and frightened out of its wits when the trappers had snagged it, and then it had been slowly cramped under the net before the rescue had come. But while it was grateful, it was very nervy. _

_So preoccupied with this, Hiccup wouldn't learn until a long time later that the Dragon Conqueror had been with the group, that he had escaped with the knowledge that the Dragon rider really did exist, and he had the power he sought._

XXX

_They look edgy, hardly surprising since they know these dragons aren't fully trained yet, but you've still got to appreciate their arrogance, their certainty that they will succeed, _Hiccup thought to himself a few days after his audience with the Dragon Conqueror. He was currently standing in the arena and his one-good eye flicked from the forms of the five armoured soldiers who were all armed, and he saw a couple of them touch their swords as if to reassure themselves that they would get through this. Hiccup didn't bother telling them to take their swords off, that by coming in here armed and dangerous, they were putting themselves at risk.

He would like to say, if he were asked later, he had not thought about it, but he knew it wouldn't happen - the Chinese soldiers were so arrogant and sure of themselves, they wouldn't think of confronting him about it anyway. In any case, he wanted this to go wrong.

Once the soldiers were in the enclosure the gatekeepers locked the gates, making the soldiers look more nervous. Hiccup had nothing to do with that order, but he had to laugh inwardly at either the Conqueror or the General; he had no idea who had issued the order, but either one of them had ordered the gates to be closed, so then the soldiers would learn how to ride a dragon.

Hiccup read between the lines; they would learn, or they would die.

Without looking once at the General or the Conqueror, Hiccup turned to the keepers up above to open the pens. Instantly the dragons burst from the pens, their long serpentine bodies slithering out of their pen, looking around expectantly for food, and a chance to fly in the air. Hiccup backed away from the dragons and moved towards the soldiers.

"There are the dragons," he began, "the first thing to do is to form a bond with them. You go to the dragons and then-,"

"Thank you, trainer," one of the soldiers replied, "but we have seen the way you do it. We can handle it."

All five of the soldiers left Hiccup, who watched them leave with his one good eye and he almost laughed when the soldiers walked towards the dragons fully armed. _This is not going to be good…_

And he was right.

The dragons caught sight of the five soldiers within seconds of them moving towards them. The approach of these five unfamiliar humans instantly alerted the dragons to danger, and they instantly tensed up. The soldiers sensed danger and two of them drew their swords. The sight of the weapons instantly sent the dragons into a terrible terrifying rage, and with a roar, all hell broke loose.

"NOOOO!" Hiccup yelled, instantly placing his part as the dragons tore two of the soldiers apart, maimed one of them, and left him screaming in agony on the ground while one of his arms had been sliced off. He held up his arms and walked towards the dragons fearlessly, hoping that his presence would calm them down.

"THOSE DRAGONS SHOULD BE KILLED-!"

Hiccup swung around and turned to look up at the General with contempt. "You are the ones who wanted this session!" Hiccup yelled, keeping as far from the dragons as possible in case his yelling aggravated them. "This is what happens when dragons are not ready to be bonded with others. In any case, your soldiers went to them without preparing themselves. They carried weapons towards them, of course, the dragons were going to attack. They thought your soldiers were going to attack them, what do you expect? Just give me a chance, and I will train them all by the end of next week, and then you will have what you want. But if you kill them, you may as well kill me, and you, master," he turned to the Dragon Conqueror, wishing he could spit the title with all the contempt it deserved, "won't be a conqueror, you will just be another man."

It took only a moment for the Conqueror to reply, but when he did Hiccup was unsurprised by the response since he had hoped it would be that, but since the Conqueror was on such a tight schedule it was easy to guess what the reply would be. He turned to his followers and said a few clear words to them, but Hiccup could not hear what he was saying, but judging from what he was saying, he was remonstrating them for something.

Finally, the Conqueror turned and looked down at Hiccup from above. "You have one week, trainer, if you fail you will be punished."

The General looked ready to burst, but the Conqueror held up his hand to shut him up, and he turned around and headed back to the palace. Hiccup watched them leave, and he looked at the carnage around him. The soldiers had been taken away, but the ground was still soaked with blood.

Still, he walked over to the dragons and he lifted his hands to the gatekeepers to release the others, giving them the impression of being a faithful servant.

He gently patted the dragon he had seen tear that soldier's arm apart. "Good girl," he whispered.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer - I don't own How to Train your Dragon, I just own this story.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

_The village was in chaos. An army of soldiers had arrived and they had already started slaughtering villagers left and right before the villagers, who had gotten out of their beds in preparation for the new day. No sooner had they left their homes than they were instantly cut down by soldiers who stormed their homes and killed the inhabitants without anyone being allowed to surrender. A few of the villagers who were skilled at combat having served as soldiers in the past did their best to defend their homes, their families, and their livelihoods grabbed their old weapons, or improvised with what they had and did their best to fight back, but there were simply too many soldiers here. _

_The soldiers were out of control. They were burning houses to the ground by shoving blazing torches into the houses and letting them catch alight before moving onto the next one as the fires became strong and built up strength. Children cried in panic as their parents tried their best to usher them to safety. Some of them made for the beach where they had their boats. They hoped to escape and find a way to lose the soldiers on the water, but many of the soldiers seemed to have cottoned on to where they were fleeing to, and they were attacked by bowman who fired a fierce and continuous volley of arrows. On the beach, there were a number of still-warm corpses of those unlucky enough to survive with their bodies riddled with arrows. _

_Hiccup winced as he struggled to hold back against a couple of the soldiers who attacked him with their blood-soaked swords. Hiccup had learnt how to fight better thanks to a Roman soldier he had met on his travels, and he was just relieved the Roman Army's standards were different compared to the Vikings who preferred brain over skill. The Chinese were no different, but it was taking all of Hiccup's skill to handle them because as soon as he had dealt with one soldier two more took their place. _

"_Why are you doing this?" Hiccup overheard one of the village elders cry out. _

"_We have done nothing!" an old woman Hiccup knew was the Matchmaker in the village (that was one tradition Hiccup actually did dislike; what was it about some cultures that made them think they needed to decide on their children's future? Sure, he understood some of the mindset, but it didn't mean he had to like it) cry out, her chubby features alarmed in frightened desperation before she screamed in agony as a soldier grabbed her from behind and impaled her bloated body before she could even beg for mercy. _

_Hiccup turned her head away, disgusted by what she'd just seen. He lifted his automatic crossbow and he fired a number of bolts at the soldiers, smiling inwardly with satisfaction when he watched them cry out as the bolts slammed into their eyes, or into their unprotected throats, but he launched himself into the fray as he tried to work out what was going on. He had thought the chaos which had plagued China and had led to the Chinese people themselves living in fragmented countries was long since gone, but somehow he had a feeling that was not the case. Hiccup grunted when suddenly an armoured soldier slammed into him and knocked him to the ground. Hiccup growled as he felt the soldier press down on him with a short knife with a gleaming blade in his hand. _

_Suddenly Hiccup lashed out with a terrific punch to the man's exposed Adams' apple, but just as the soldier instantly went off into a terrible fit, Hiccup grabbed the soldier's neck and head and twisted it around like he was wringing the neck of a chicken. The soldier only had time to give out a horrendous choking cry before Hiccup snapped his neck. Hiccup didn't bother looking down at the man's corpse with any shame, he had long since passed that point, he just looked around to see if there were more soldiers nearest to him before he raised his crossbow again to fire when he caught sight of one of the enemy bowman raising his long-bow and aiming his arrow. Hiccup turned to see where it was being aimed and he saw with anger that the bowman was aiming at a father trying to lead his wife and daughter away. Hiccup didn't even stop to think - he just raised his crossbow and fired the bolt. The little projectile sliced clean through the archer's throat. Hiccup looked away and fired more bolts at the soldiers while he ducked the swing of a sword that reflected some of the early morning light into his eye, but he recovered quickly to punch the man in the face before snapping his neck. _

_Hiccup was just getting into the fray of the massacre when he overheard several of the soldiers barking out orders. "Find the Dragon rider…" or "where is the black dragon hiding? We must find it!" _

_They were after him and Toothless. Hiccup fired more bolts at the rampaging soldiers before he rushed to his small room in the blacksmith stall. He had only gotten this stall much like he had gotten the ones he'd had previously on Berk and on Nadder's Point and at different places in countries and lands never really visited or known about by other Norsemen like himself, but showing the blacksmiths there what he could do. Hiccup ran into the back of the little room and he took out three very small terracotta pots that were sealed with a blob of wax though there was a metal pipe sticking in both of them with a small length of black twine sticking out of it. Hiccup didn't even stop to think as he bundled them all up in his hands, and he took them up in his arms before he rushed to the front of the shop before he dropped to the ground to survey the slaughter going on right there in front of him. _

_The soldiers had managed to get into the village and were now simply burning down the houses and shops around them. They showed no mercy toward any of their victims, they just simply rampaged through the village like a great black flood or a swarm of giant black insects washing away all trace of the village. Not even the children of the village were spared. _

_**Why are they doing this, just to get to me? **__Hiccup thought with disbelief; he had seen mass slaughters before, but the Chinese were extremely thorough. Not once did they leave a house left alone. They searched each one, and more than once they came across children or teenagers trying to find a place to hide inside. Sometimes the soldiers found them, but other times they weren't lucky, but even then the soldiers would set the entire house alight. _

_And then Hiccup realised the truth of the whole mess. _

_They weren't wiping out the village for the sake of it. They just didn't want any witnesses of the event. Whoever had ordered this attack had really thought this out, but it was the sheer callousness of the whole thing that sickened him. They wanted him and his dragon, and yet they were prepared to slaughter a village full of their own people just to do it, but no-one here even knew about Toothless, so what was the point?_

_Hiccup realised he wasn't getting anywhere with trying to work out what the hell was going on, so he focused his attention on the bombs he'd made. It had taken him time, but he had managed to find a way of refining the recipe for Chinese gunpowder using various ingredients and experiments he'd come up with on his travels. He'd had a wonderful time trying out different minerals and materials that could make the explosives more potent, and he had even come up with a few variants of the original mixture he had found out about in Gobber's old recipe book he'd brought back from his own travels abroad during the days where he had been young, but this was not the time to really try out some of the more extreme bombs, though he had two of them right here. _

_Hiccup placed all of the bombs on the floor of the blacksmith stall in front of him and he spent a couple of minutes working on the crossbow. He switched the bolt loader off before he reworked it so then it would fire heavier objects. He looked at the mechanism, but he couldn't see anything wrong with it, so he picked up one of the bombs, stuck the fuse into the fire and he fitted the bomb to the crossbow. He aimed it and fired at the soldiers. _

_The soldiers looked a bit surprised something seemed to have landed in their midst, but before they could do anything more than panic and raise the alarm at what had been thrown at them, it was too late. The bomb exploded, blasting several of the soldiers to pieces while a few cried out in their agony as the shrapnel from the bomb casing and the bits of really sharp metal slashed them to pieces. _

_Hiccup had been experimenting with the basic bomb idea, and he had come to wonder just how great it would be if he added some really really sharp and thick pieces of metal to the bomb, so when it exploded the metal would slash anyone who had managed to escape the initial blast. It looked like it worked marvellously, albeit a bit brutally. _

_Still, it worked. _

_Hiccup reached for the next bomb, and he lit the fuse and stuck it on the crossbow and fired it at another group of soldiers who were slicing their way through the screaming crowd. Hiccup fired at them, wincing in regret at the thought of injuring more of these people who had made this part of China their home. The bomb landed close to the largest group of soldiers though this time they hadn't noticed it landing near them, but they screamed in agony and panic when it exploded and the pieces of metal which were smaller than the blades of daggers and swords managed to penetrate their armour since it they were propelled at really high speed. Hiccup barely spared them any more of a glance before he fired the next bomb, and then the next. _

_The next bomb he lifted was different from the others. It too had a terracotta casing, only this one was covered crudely in red and yellow paint to differentiate it from the others. Still, Hiccup lit up the fuse, and he stuck the bomb onto his crossbow and fired. When the bomb exploded this time a cloud of reddish smoke appeared in a flash, but Hiccup ignored the explosion although it brought a smile to his face when he heard the cries of fear as the smoke suddenly burnt their eyes. _

_Hiccup looked at the village and he realised he had done all he could to fight the soldiers on the ground. There was nothing more he could do here, he had to get to Toothless, though at the moment his mind was more on fleeing from the village and making his way to another part of China. He had heard of the dragons of Japan in any case, so if he decided to just leave this dragon-hating country for good then so be it. _

_Getting out of the boundary of the village was not that difficult though he had needed to hide in a few bushes along the way and, as much as it hurt him to admit it, he had needed to use the villagers to keep the soldiers occupied so he could reach the cave. But just as he was climbing up the hill, he was spotted and a few arrows smashed and snapped against the rockface. _

_He guessed they didn't know who he was, but that didn't matter really. Hiccup found Toothless rushing around the cave, looking agitated. He had heard the fighting and the screams from the cave, and it had disturbed him. The moment the Night Fury realised he was there, he instantly bounded over and checked to see if he was alright. _

"_I'm okay, bud," Hiccup was quick to assure Toothless with a pat on the head before he noticed with dismay that the tail-fin was not attached to Toothless' tail. Hiccup bit his lip before he decided this was a good time to test out the new tail fin. Hiccup headed over to the rack he'd prepared to hold onto the tail-fins, and Toothless followed him. _

_The Night Fury warbled doubtfully when he saw his rider lift up the tail-fin he'd spent so long slaving over, the one he had made so many prototypes for. The one he had not truly and properly tested yet._

"_I know, bud. I know the risks," Hiccup said, knowing precisely what the problem was, "but we have gotta get out of here and out there."_

_Truth be told Hiccup shared his dragons' worries, and as he attached the tail-fin to Toothless' tail and rechecked the complex mechanism, those same doubts warred inside of him. _

"_Alright, bud," he said quietly even though he could feel the Night Fury's feeling of anticipation even though he was nervous about flying without a truly proven tail-fin, remembering all of those numerous little disasters they'd gone through with the early prototypes. "Let's just take this as normally as we could. Let's just take this nice and slowly, yeah?" _

_The Night Fury rumbled in anticipation, though deep down, the dragon was nervous about what could potentially happen. Toothless had learnt the hard way not to be over-exuberant when it came to the prosthetics, and he had learnt from each experience that it was always usually Hiccup who took the brunt of the outcomes. _

_In this situation, he had no intention of making a mistake. Still, he swept his wings back and leapt into the air. Hiccup took a deep breath as his Night Fury took flight in the air, and he banked around and swerved back down in a U-turn all the way down to the ground. Hiccup's foot tried to go through with the motions of controlling the fin, only to remember that the new tail-fin didn't work like the good-old model he had worked on, the tail-fin that had been the link between him and his dragon friend. Hiccup bit his lip, feeling like a back-seat rider to his dragon. _

_It was a feeling he genuinely did not like. Hiccup pushed that aside, even though he had no real idea what this would mean to him and Toothless in the future, since a large part of what had made them into a formidable team in the past had been swept away. _

"_Okay bud," Hiccup said clearly into the dragon's ear as they swept down to the ground. "Let's make this good."_

_Toothless growled and a moment later he started to emit the blood-chilling whistle that had made his breed feared throughout the Barbaric Archipelago. From where he was sitting, Hiccup could see the reactions of the Chinese soldiers on the ground. A sadistic grin crossed Hiccup's face as he saw the soldiers on the ground, looking from where he was in the air look like ants from a human point of view when they looked down on the ground and saw the little black bugs running around their various tasks, foraging for food and so on, he observed with some amusement, only these bugs were running about in terror as they watched the black dragon fly towards them with incredible speed. _

_Hiccup tensed in the saddle as he felt Toothless readying himself for an attack. The Night Fury fired two plasma bursts at the ground before he pulled up, and Hiccup turned his head to see where the dragon had aimed for. He had to admit they were well placed. Toothless had aimed them towards the densest places where the soldiers were, and they were blown to the ground in moments. Hiccup felt no sympathy for them, and as he got Toothless to bank up again for another hit, Hiccup reached into the saddlebags for the strapped-in weapons he'd worked on over the years. He pulled out a larger version of the crossbow he had used down on the ground, only this one was capable of far more and featured a much larger drum which contained the bolts. _

_Hiccup only just managed to select the switch when Toothless dived down again and fired another plasma burst at the ground. The soldiers tried to dodge, but Hiccup silently applauded his dragons' cunning when the plasma burst was directed at another place, blasting a small party of soldiers off of their feet. Hiccup didn't care, he swung his crossbow around and started firing at the ground as Toothless swooped around with incredible speed. _

_As his dragon swept over the beach, where he caught sight of the corpses of the villagers, Hiccup felt ill. The soldiers had killed these innocent people just to catch hold of him. _

_Hiccup had no idea what the soldiers wanted of him, but he didn't care. He was going to make them regret it; he wouldn't bring the villagers back, but just by wiping out the people who had wanted him for whatever reason though he guessed it was the same old boring reason, the same reason Alvin the Treacherous and the other Outcasts had wanted him, why that stupid, spoilt Indian Prince had tried to have him and his dragon captured for his own amusement, why the Romans had hounded him when he had made a sweeping stopover exploration of that small corner of the Roman's Empire. _

_They wanted him to pass on his knowledge of dragon training. _

_**It never ends, does it? **__Hiccup thought to himself angrily as Toothless began to sweep over the village itself, __**How many more people are going to try to get hold of me so then they can train dragons to be used as weapons? **_

_Hiccup knew the answer, of course - it would never end. _

_As long as people knew about him, then someone with ambitions and delusions of grandeur would try something like this, again and again. _

_He took a deep breath, and he looked down at the village, or rather what was left of it. Many of the houses and shops that had once been bustling in the village square were now charred stumps of rubble, many of them were still smouldering while the Chinese soldiers were setting them alight. Hiccup watched them but decided not to do anything about it since there was nothing he could really do about it now. Hiccup knew if anyone came to the village, maybe someone who lived here, and discovered the burning houses and the corpses everywhere, they would just assume a band of raiders had attacked and destroyed everything they could find. Some of the soldiers, mostly those who had seen what the Night Fury had done to their fellows, threw themselves out of harm's way. The braver warriors, however, still fired up arrows, but they were too slow against the power of the Hiccup's Night Fury. _

_Hiccup continued to fire down on the soldiers from above while Toothless continued to fire plasma bursts although both the dragon and the rider were mindful of the limits; the last thing they wanted was to destroy something important here and not have enough gasses left to destroy it. While they were flying above the village, Hiccup felt something hit him in his back and he let out a yell, startling Toothless before a dark mass slammed into him from the side and knocked him off of his dragon and into a nearby pond. The impact of the water was agony, and Hiccup was in shock while he felt the soldier who had knocked him off Toothless, and for a moment Hiccup floundered in the water while the soldier grabbed him around the neck. Hiccup choked when he felt the man's armour wrapping itself around his throat and choked. _

_He distantly heard Toothless's shriek and he opened his eye to see the black dragon heading towards him. It took a moment for Hiccup to notice the soldiers hiding much larger looking bows with wicked-looking arrows being readied to fire. The sight made Hiccup forget he was being choked and he concentrated his energy and he shoved his finger into the soldier's eye, making him cry out. _

_Not giving himself time to use the respite he had now he was free, Hiccup called out. "Toothless, LOOK OUT!" he yelled as best he could, but the choke and the water had rendered his nasal voice a little croaky. _

_The dragon didn't listen to him, and the two bowmen fired, but Toothless managed to avoid one of the arrows. He couldn't avoid the other. _

"_Toothless!" Hiccup screamed, ignoring the pain in his throat as he raced for the bank of the pond and heaved himself out of it while his Night Fury shrieked with pain. The sight of his dragon high up in the air, shrieking and writhing with agony angered Hiccup, but just as he was about to call for his dragon to come after him, he took note of the soldiers around him coming closer and closer. _

_It was then Hiccup realised the game was up and he glared with one eye in frustration around him before he came up with a horrible choice. Cupping his hands together, Hiccup yelled up at Toothless, who was just recovering from his injury. "TOOTHLESS, GET AWAY FROM HERE! REMEMBER WHAT WE AGREED UPON IF SOMETHING LIKE THIS EVER HAPPENED? WELL, IT'S HAPPENING! NOW GET OUT OF HERE! GO! GO! GET OUT OF HERE, BEFORE THEY CATCH YOU!"_

_Toothless ignored him and performed a dive-bomb. Hiccup cursed his dragon, __**Why won't he listen to me?**_

_A massive mesh net suddenly appeared from nowhere and it very nearly snared Toothless if the Night Fury hadn't dodged out of the way and flew upwards to dodge it. _

"_Toothless! YOU HAVE TO GO, LEAVE ME! I'LL BE ALRIGHT!"_

_The Night Fury shrieked. _

"_DON'T BE LIKE THAT!" he yelled. "I WILL FIND YOU! NOW GO!"_

_The soldiers knocked him to the ground while he still continued to yell at his stubborn Night Fury. In the end, the dragon did as he was told, though not before he let out a mournful shriek. _

Hiccup studied the young woman before him, wondering why it was every time he dealt with the Dragon Conqueror and the General they seemed to enjoy the stumbling blocks they placed in his path. The woman, a peasant, had been presented to him earlier to make the dragons more receptive to Chinese riders. Hiccup understood their theories, really he did, but he didn't like the way they forced themselves into his training.

"Are you frightened of the dragons?" Hiccup asked her, uncaring if she did.

The woman nodded, looking at him fearfully as if the concept of being near the dragons in an enclosed space was enough to terrify the life out of her. Hiccup couldn't say he blamed her. He remembered how Gobber had begun the training program on Berk, and how it had been a harrowing day with the Gronckle. At the time Hiccup had been reeling from the fact the Night Fury he'd been prepared to kill hadn't killed him, so his mind hadn't really been on the job as he had been too curious.

Hiccup said nothing as the woman confirmed his theories. "Alright," he replied while he cursed the General's cowardice in sending this unprepared woman, "stick with me, and if I tell you to do something, do it."

The woman nodded. "I-I understand."

But Hiccup was not going to be swayed that easily. "I mean it," he said quietly as they approached the dragons. "If I tell you to run or drop to the ground, do it. And do not look into the eyes of the dragon if you run away," he advised. "I've seen them go for hunters stupid enough to do that, and they end up dying. A dragon can tell if you're planning on injuring them just by looking into your eyes."

The woman looked at him pale.

Hiccup sighed. "Why did they send you to me?" he asked bluntly; he might have tried to be polite on a good day, but he truly wasn't in the mood and besides with these people's unsavoury attitude towards dragons, Hiccup was unlikely to be polite.

"They said they wanted to see if it was safe for one of us to….to bond with the …..dragons," the woman stuttered, looking around the arena as if hoping for some way out of this.

Hiccup inwardly smirked. His plan to _persuade _the dragons had gone perfectly. A few more sessions like this, and he would have aided his own agenda. _The general was right not to trust me, _Hiccup thought to himself, _although I don't think the _master _does either. I don't doubt the bastard plans on killing me once I've passed down my knowledge of dragon training. As if I'll let that happen…_ "Alright, I'll go and prepare a dragon. You stay here. When you see the dragon, keep _very still. _Don't run. Keep your eyes on the dragon, let it see what you are thinking. If you don't the dragon will see as a threat."

The woman swallowed in terror.

_You aren't so tough without a gang of soldiers to back you lot up when it comes to dragons, are you, you bunch of fools? _Hiccup scoffed mentally as he thought about all of the Chinese.

Still, he patted her gently with a thin layer of kindness when he saw she truly was frightened. "I'll be here, but remember - if I tell you to do something, don't give me the same dragon shit from the General, in here you listen to me, or you die," Hiccup said, knowing he was being harsh, but he found himself not caring.

The woman nodded, too petrified to speak, and Hiccup was worried the woman's fear would make her a truly attractive target for a dragon. Chinese people were hated and feared by the dragons, although as a rule, many dragons saw humans as nothing more but simple pests who simply loved killing them.

Hiccup sighed and walked towards the pens. He had the perfect dragon in mind for this woman, although he hoped she didn't suffer from nightmares as a result, he shook that off knowing she would be getting nightmares anyhow.

He went to one of the Burning Flames; Hiccup knew he could have chosen a different breed, but the Burning Flame had a reputation similar to that of the Timberjacks, the Night Furies, and the Monstrous Nightmares of the Barbaric Archipelago. If he showed the Dragon Conqueror and his general that he could get this dragon to bond with a human briefly, it would go a long way to getting them off of his back…

"Okay, girl," Hiccup whispered, thankful he had learnt the difference in gender, and he touched the dragon's head. "The time has come. There is a woman out there in the arena, you are going to have to bond with her temporarily. Remember, this is for your freedom, do you understand?"

The dragon growled, snorting through its nostrils.

It had never failed to amaze Hiccup dragons were so intelligent they were capable of understanding those around them, and they could obey a plan he gave them.

After a few more minutes of coaxing, Hiccup led the dragon out of the pen and into the arena. The moment the dragon locked eyes with the woman, she instantly began to growl, but she cooed with pleasure when Hiccup found her sweet spot to stop the growling. Still, Hiccup found he couldn't exactly blame the dragon for being this way, given what the Chinese had done to the dragons over the years.

Hiccup led the dragon slowly towards the woman to make the pair of them more used to one another. As he approached the peasant, Hiccup realised to himself this was actually a learning curve for himself as well; he had only become as good as he had thanks to the days he had spent learning about Toothless, but he had never taught anyone how to bond with dragons-

He stopped the thought as soon as it popped into his mind. Thinking of Toothless hurt. While he had definitely bonded with the dragons here, they were prison bonds. They had been locked up much as he had, and they were continuing to suffer from the threat of death over them, but thinking of Toothless reminded him of the mess which had separated them both.

Hiccup saw the peasant's terrified expression clearly, and he could definitely feel the dragon's own feelings. The Burning Flame was not frightened of the peasant, but she wasn't happy since the stupid woman was not hiding her fear. Hiccup patted the dragon soothingly, knowing that despite their toughness dragons were sensitive beings, and they responded to the moods around them.

Hiccup stopped the dragon just a few feet away from the woman, and after he made sure the dragon stayed still he went over and held up a crudely wrapped cloth parcel. He unwrapped it and showed the woman who leaned in close to see what it was.

Inside the parcel was a fish.

"What am I supposed to do?" the woman asked.

"You're going to offer it to the dragon as a peace offering. Dragons value food more than anything else; I've seen dragons offer rivals a number of fish as an act of respect," Hiccup softly told her before he gently placed the parcel in her shaking arms. "Now, take the fish and offer it to the Burning Flame, but do it slowly and whatever you do, _don't take your eyes away from the dragons."_

The woman squeaked and she shook with terror as she picked up the fish by the tail end. The dragon cocked her head curiously. Hiccup smirked at her obvious surprise, pleased the cloth which he'd deliberately scented with the Chinese version of dragon nip had worked out.

The woman walked slowly towards the dragon. Hiccup looked up at the outside of the arena briefly, wondering how the self-appointed Dragon Conqueror and the General, and the other senior warriors under their command were taking in the scene. He turned back to the woman as she slowly walked towards the dragon, the fish in front of her.

The Burning Flame did not move, clearly surprised by the gesture. Hiccup was reminded of the time he had tamed Toothless, and the other dragons on Berk and on other islands throughout the archipelago and beyond. He had learnt a great deal from each encounter. He knew the surprise would wear off soon when the woman was close enough to the dragon, he just hoped the woman was prepared for what could come next.

_Actually, I _hope _I'm prepared for what could come next. several_

The woman stopped right in front of the dragon. Hiccup watched them worriedly, hoping the woman didn't do something that would make the dragon react badly, but he hoped his faith in the dragon was spot on; the Burning Flame knew what was at stake, and this wasn't exactly what he'd originally planned to do, but he was pleased with the slight shift. If this worked then it would go a long way into ensuring his long term plans went ahead.

The woman held out the fish.

The dragon snorted a little and slowly approached the woman.

"Keep still, let her come to you," Hiccup said softly but still loud enough for the woman to hear him.

The woman trembled as the dragon approached. "It's alright," she heard the foreigner speak in his strange nasally accented voice. "She's just curious about you, but don't make any sudden moves."

The woman kept as still as a statue, hardly daring to breathe, never mind move. The dragon suddenly lunged forward and grabbed the fish, sending the shocked woman to the ground, but the Burning Flame ignored this as it ate the fish and swallowed.

Hiccup crouched down near the woman. "It's alright, it's alright," he said to calm her down. "Just take it easy."

The woman shivered, but she went very still when she noticed the dragon approaching her cautiously. The dragon sniffed her lightly, butting her head into the woman's stomach.

"I think you've got a friend," Hiccup whispered with a smile.

The dragon suddenly backed away, growling before she stepped back.

Hiccup helped the peasant back up, slowly leading her to the dragon. The Burning Flame, playing along with Hiccup's plan, allowed the Chinese woman to come closer and touch the dragon.

The woman smiled, gaining confidence as she continued to spend time with the dragon. The Burning Flame, however, glanced at Hiccup, who inclined his head. With that, the dragon growled at the woman threateningly, and the two - one Chinese person and one Burning Flame dragon - returned to their old ways.

When the woman was led away after the dragon slashed the ground threateningly, Hiccup escorted the dragon back into the pen.

"Good girl. Now we can begin," he whispered into the dragon's ears.


	4. Chapter 4

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

Hiccup was sitting in the middle of a circle with the dragons from the arena clustered around him, all of them calm and relaxed after he had worn them out, but all of them were listening with an air of reverence only the smartest and most forward-thinking Chinaman could detect, while he tootled a tune on the piece of bamboo he'd crafted into a flute. Hiccup had been playing tunes to dragons for a long time, especially since those far-flung days he had been in the Barbaric Archipelago. Although they detested loud bangs and had sensitive hearing, dragons loved the sound when it was flowing and low, just like ordinary human beings.

It especially worked well when played on high-spirited dragons who were full of energy. The Chinese didn't know about this, and if he were honest he doubted they would try to use it in their own attempts to control dragons. You didn't play music to a dragon and expected it to become instantly tame. You had to have the trust of the dragon already, or the dragon knew you were no threat at all.

Since he had the trust of these dragons, Hiccup didn't have any problems with playing them tunes like this on his homemade flute.

Hiccup had discovered this just by chance rather than by design, rather like he had discovered so many things by accident when he had been stuck on Berk learning how to train dragons, and since then he had learnt how to play basic, traditional Viking songs he knew off by heart. When he had begun travelling the world, he had picked up other songs, and he had played them to various dragons that he encountered in other countries.

Toothless especially - no, it was best not to think about him.

Swallowing his worry, and his sadness for his first best friend since he didn't even know for sure if the Night Fury was even still alive, although Hiccup knew Toothless wasn't stupid enough to take foolish risks when he was vulnerable, Hiccup looked at the dragons thoughtfully.

"Do you know the story….of how I became the Dragon Pirate?" Hiccup asked them.

The dragons looked at each other curiously, but they turned expectantly back to Hiccup.

"Do you want to know?"

The dragons grunted.

Hiccup smiled and tootled another section of the tune he was currently playing for their benefit. "The story begins on the..the….the island of Berk. A small clump of rock, in the middle of Barbaric Archipelago. It is populated by a Viking tribe known as the Hairy Hooligans. For years, the Vikings were at war with the dragons in that part of the world."

Hiccup sighed when the mood of the dragons around him shifted like a stormy tide. "This war," he interrupted knowing the dragons would react badly if he gave them an insight of the war he had witnessed since he was old enough to walk and talk, "this war between Viking and Dragon…No-one really knew what it was about. Even its origins were lost in history, but the popular story was the Vikings encountered the dragons, and the dragons attacked them. The Vikings were furious and for years in the past, they hunted the dragons relentlessly, and they discovered several small nests which they broke into, and destroyed."

The dragons were furious now at the mention of the destruction and the deaths of many dragons, some of them were probably younglings who didn't even deserve to suffer.

"I know how angry you are," Hiccup looked at them all seriously, "but it won't help now. This took place centuries ago. The Vikings fought the dragons relentlessly, tracking them down through the Barbaric Archipelago. At some point - I don't know when - the dragons began stealing the food from the Vikings, and the Vikings did not like it, so they sent out expeditions to track down their larger nest and destroy it. They discovered many islands during their quest to find the nest that was uninhabited but offered many resources for colonisation, and they eventually followed the dragons to a large wall of mists and fog, but they didn't have the resources to pass through it even if they were willing. The Viking sailors and warriors were tired; the journey had taken many months, and some of them were killed off by dragons they claimed later had attacked them, so they were in bad shape. According to legend, the Vikings decided they would settle the islands seen by the expeditions into the Archipelago to end the threat they saw the dragons being. Many ships left the original homeland, visiting the different islands, and they began colonising them."

Hiccup tootled another tune on the flute as he gathered his thoughts together. "The Vikings took their time colonising the archipelago. They became scattered on all of the islands they found which were large enough to house a large population of Vikings to grow as small, isolated societies; while they shared the same basic traditions and values, the tribes grew small, mini societies with their laws. In the same period, their knowledge of dragons grew, and each tribe came up with similar but differing methods of dealing with the dragons they fought. For three centuries, the Dragon War went on, with the Vikings believing the dragons were attacking them simply because they wanted their food."

Hiccup sighed as he closed his eyes remembering each of the raids he'd seen during his time on Berk, back in the days where he had tried so hard to fit in with the rest of the tribe, trying and failing to impress Stoick and garnering some respect from the others in his generation, only to repeatedly fail until he had no-one to speak to without the other ignoring him being Gobber, although the blacksmith wasn't the ideal long-term companion since there was a massive gulf between their ages and their attitudes.

"Generation after generation of Viking children learnt to become fighters," Hiccup went on, "many of them giving their lives, becoming heroes to the Viking tribes, who lauded their efforts although, in the long-term, nothing came out of the conflict. Periodically - I don't know how often the other tribes frequently tried their best to track down the nest, and destroy it to end the war - the tribes would send expeditions out to find the nest. The nest was hidden behind a wall of fog and mist. Each time the Vikings attacked, the dragons would retaliate, using their aerial supremacy to get the upper hand while they roasted the Vikings."

The dragons Hiccup was speaking to grunted and growled in a manner Hiccup took to be fairly triumphant, or smug. He ignored it. "By the time my generation came into existence, the war had been fought for three centuries in a perpetual loop; the dragons would raid, pillage, and then they would leave. The newer Viking generation made up of teenagers would be forced into a dragon training course, where they'd learn how to fight off the dragons."

Hiccup snorted. "I tried…for years, I tried so hard to be one of them," he shook his head as he momentarily unlocked the box where he kept the memories of how he had been humiliated time and time again simply whenever he had wanted to help the tribe and contribute something since no-one respected him, only for it to go up in smoke, or with a bang since Snotlout and the twins had all gone out of their way to cause destruction in the village, and blaming it all on him. "But it never worked out. I had….no-one," he held the flute awkwardly for a moment as the darker memories of how his own father had beaten him when Stoick knew he was the last member of his family left filled his head. "Not even my father. My father…. The years passed, and it wasn't until one particular raid I discovered the truth about the dragons," Hiccup went on, tootling on the flute for a moment. "I shot one down. I was prepared to kill him. But….I didn't."

Hiccup looked down at his hands as he remembered that fateful day where he began to see dragons were not the unthinking monsters he had grown up believing them to be, along with the rest of the child of Berk. "You see," he said, deciding to come out and say it, "my people, well, my former people," he added the correction, "claimed for years dragons were emotionless, unthinking monsters…and yet, when I looked into the eyes of the dragon, I saw fear. He was afraid. I cut him loose. He leapt on me," Hiccup smiled in remembrance, recalling vividly the real anger he had seen in Toothless' eyes when the Night Fury had jumped out at him.

"According to Viking teachings…I should have died. Anyway," Hiccup changed the subject. "I was placed in a course while my fool of a father, well ex-father now," he shook his head as he remembered how angry he had been with Stoick for years, yet at the same time upset any kind of bond between himself and the man had died, although it had died a long time ago, "a course meant to train young Vikings into dragon killers. I deliberately did the bare minimum, although I did go into the course to learn a few tricks here and there; to the Vikings, while I didn't throw myself into the course, I did learn about dodging and a few Viking trade secrets."

Hiccup tootled on the flute for a few minutes in remembrance of those days spent in the dragon training course in the Kill Ring. He remembered the other teenagers; Ruffnut and Tuffnut, Snotlout, Fishlegs, and Astrid. He paused a little as his mind turned to the blonde shield maiden who may have been as beautiful as a Valkyrie, and yet her heart and soul was as rotten as a mound of fish left in the sunlight for a month before being encased in a block of ice.

He decided to gloss over what happened in the Kill Ring. None of it was relevant anyway, although there were a few moments which were.

"I learnt a few lessons from the very first lesson; the first lesson is no matter what the circumstances, you are on your own," Hiccup told the dragons at last. "Lesson number two….dragons don't always go for the kill the moment they see you're there. Sometimes, they will show mercy. The third lesson….always be ready to duck in case dragons are agitated, or some very very stupid people are with you."

The dragons grunted while Hiccup just tootled on his flute as he remembered that lesson; how Gobber had released the Gronckle into the Kill Ring, and how the other teens had either proven how pathetic they really were, although the only one to show even a modicum of seriousness had, naturally, been Astrid, although he felt he had come close himself.

Hiccup had seen the dragon training course throughout his childhood. Sure, many of the teens and the adults had shooed him away. He had resented them for that, for their belief he would screw it all up for them as if his presence would magically unleash the dragons in the arena on the village. As if! He had known from the moment Stoick had ironically condemned him to the course just when the first cracks in his belief system about dragons who had frequently raided Berk for as long as he could remember, even for as long as Gothi herself could remember and the first realisations he couldn't kill a dragon despite working himself to the bone for years since he had first started working with Gobber when he'd worked out he could never use any of the conventional Viking weapons which needed a great deal of strength to use them properly, the course was not a picnic.

Some of the things he had seen had been horrific.

He had seen Nadder's, quick as a flash while rushing as light on their feet as they'd go, shrieking at the teenagers who were foolish enough to mess with them. He had seen Zipplebacks gas the arena until the air was choked with the stench of their flammable gas before they ignited it.

He had known the danger even then.

That second day where he and the rest of the teens of their generation had gone up against the Deadly Nadder had been because he couldn't find Gobber in time to ask him questions about the Night Fury. It hadn't been intentional, although he had to admit it was stupid.

"I kept going back to that dragon, the one I'd shot down. It took time, but I went at it slowly. I gave him some fish as a peace offering, and he accepted to the point of regurgitating of a piece in my lap for me to eat," Hiccup went on. He looked at the dragons expectantly, and he smiled when he saw all of them looking at each other before gazing back at him.

Hiccup had seen dragons be offered pieces of their food in the past after he had left Berk. Sure, he had no idea what it all meant, especially in the long term although he guessed it was similar to the type of friendship he'd seen often on his travels.

"But one night I was with the other teens, and our…teacher," Hiccup stumbled on the word since Gobber and the word teacher didn't entirely go together, somehow despite the long years he'd spent as the man's apprentice, a role he had enjoyed although there had been a few ups and downs, but that went with every job, right? "And he said _"a downed dragon, is a dead dragon,"' _and I remembered I had torn off the dragon's tail fin. I worked the remainder of the night on the prosthetic. In the morning I took it to the dragon, and some more fish to keep him distracted while I slipped it on. It didn't take long for him to realise what was going on, and he took off. It wasn't the best flight I'd been on," he added ruefully, shaking his head. "We both ended up in the water."

The dragons, demonstrating their rather weird sense of humour, laughed.

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," Hiccup said sarcastically. He had dropped his sarcastic demeanour a long time ago, mostly because there was no-one around to be sarcastic too. Besides most of the people he was near weren't like Snotlout or the twins, so it wasn't even needed, but he still dropped into his old facade occasionally from time to time, especially here since the General and the Dragon Conqueror were both very very very stupid. "But as the days passed, I perfected the tail-fin. It took time for me to get it right, but eventually, it reached a point where I could fly the dragon and work the prosthetic. But all that time…I know he wouldn't be happy until he had his independent flying skills back. I couldn't say I blamed him.

"My father had gone on a hunt for the dragon nest. It was a complete waste of time and lives and resources, of course; the dragons had the mists and aerial supremacy on their side, all the Vikings had were axes and hammers and no idea how far they were going to go before the dragons attacked. He wasn't happy. He had lost so many to the hunt with nothing else to show for it, so when he discovered I wasn't excelling, well he was neither pleased nor really surprised," Hiccup went on, thinking the last part was an understatement of the confrontation he'd had with Stoick. "But I didn't let that get me down. I had flown on the dragon's back. Alright, there were a few bad parts, but in the end, it was good."

Hiccup shook his head amused as he recalled how he had accidentally flown Toothless into those sea stacks and irritated the Night Fury before his cheatsheet had been blown away by the wind. "I decided to leave shortly after that," he admitted to the dragons, "so I made preparations. But I wanted to see for myself just how good the dragon was with long-range flights especially since I had begun to see the potential of flying on a dragon, but I needed to see if he was up to the challenge with the new prosthetic. But that night," Hiccup shook his head and tootled on the flute, "I saw the nest. My dragon had overheard the call of the Queen responsible for the three hundred years of war, and we were dragged into the nest just as a flock of dragons were feeding her. I even saw one of the dragons be eaten alive for failing to get her a large amount of food."

Hiccup wasn't surprised in the least when he saw the reaction ripple through the throng of dragons. Although nests in China were almost nonexistent, the dragons here knew such things were possible. In truth, Hiccup had discovered nests where Alphas and Queens differed in personality; some were good, and some were bad. Although the average dragon was approachable so long as you didn't attack it, or threaten its young, their personalities differed like an ordinary human; some were nice, some were nasty, and some were weak.

The Gronckle he had seen be eaten by the Queen in the nest…. Hiccup didn't know if the dragon had suffered some kind of tragedy that made it slow-witted, or if it was just stupid by nature, but he hadn't had long to tell. Even in hindsight, he had no idea.

Hiccup carried on with the story. "My dragon and I…we barely managed to get out of the nest, but on the way back to Berk I finally understood the rules and the nature of the war for the first time. In those minutes we were in the nest, I saw the war was a lot more different than any Viking imagined. Unfortunately, when we got back to the cove…we were ambushed.

"Another of the Vikings had followed me into the cove. I don't know when, but it must have been shortly after I had begun flying on my dragon," Hiccup paused; he hated using those two words to describe Toothless, but he didn't dare say his best friend's name, out of fear of what might have happened to him. "Anyway, however she did it…we were found out," Hiccup closed his eyes while a bitter, rancid taste came into his mouth as he tried to stop the memory of the ambush flooding his mind before Stoick had disowned him. "My father disowned me, threatened my dragon…in order to save our lives…I told him about the nest. My father…ex-father, as the case proved to be, chained my dragon upon a ship. I managed to escape the island, taming another dragon and I flew after the Vikings before my father made the mistake of rousing the Queen. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered in hindsight because the Vikings were still a nasty people.

"When I got there, the Queen was out. The Vikings of my former tribe had used catapults to smash open the rock wall, and the dragons living inside had fled as fast as they could," Hiccup went on. "By the time I arrived, the Queen had already incinerated the ships. The Vikings were trapped. I managed to save my dragon, and I rode him up into the sky after pissing the Queen off."

The dragons growled and shivered as one. They knew how bad that must have been.

"Yeah, I know," Hiccup argued. "But I flew up into the skies, using the clouds as cover while we attacked her. We led her back down to the beach of the island the nest was centred in, and I had my dragon fire a blast into the Queen's mouth. The ignition of her gases created great rips to form in her wings, and as she crashed into the ground where she exploded."

The dragons growled purringly.

"After the battle, I ignored my father's attempts at reconciliation. As far as I was concerned, the world was fully open to me. Why would I want to be tied down to an island? In any case, I had nothing in the tribe to hold me there, so I left. But there was only one thing to do. I went back to Berk and I freed the remaining dragons. For months I travelled around the Archipelago, breaking into their training arenas and freeing the dragons there," Hiccup looked down, lowering the flute.

The dragons looked at each other for a moment before they looked back at their trainer and friend. They had known him long enough to know whenever he paused in his stories, it was something bad.

"Some of the dragons….were badly treated," Hiccup said, clenching his fists around the flute, letting the dragons know that it was an understatement. "But I did free many of them throughout the archipelago, but while I flew around from one island to the next freeing dragons, I was exploring the islands, travelling further than even the most determined merchant. I found so many things. I found islands with dragon colonies which were safely isolated from the war, and had no allegiance to the Queen I killed. In the meantime, I had started planning and making preparations to leave the archipelago. I started gathering supplies, maps and diaries from travellers and merchants to get an idea of which way to go first."

Hiccup let a full but soft smile play across his lips as he remembered those innocent days. But the smile was snuffed out quickly.

"Unfortunately, peace was never to last," he said.

Hiccup tootled a tune out on the flute, thinking about his next words with great care. He wanted to get this all out quickly without spending ages explaining the ins and the outs of what happened to him.

"When I ended the War, stories of what I'd done swept through the archipelago, and when I began freeing dragons more and more people gave them credence," Hiccup didn't bother admitting he had actually flown Toothless really close to travellers and the like in order to put people off the scent of finding him, "and many saw dragons as the next war machine and many Vikings sought me out, hoping to capture me to make me give up my dragon training talents.

"I eluded them for months. Unfortunately, I was captured when I let my guard down. I was tortured until I managed to escape, but I lost my eye in the process," Hiccup gestured at his lost eye. "After that, I decided to lash out against the entire archipelago. I had become so frustrated by being hunted, I decided to teach the tribes a lesson. I began raiding the villages and ships throughout the archipelago, stealing everything I could. I hit dozens of tribes hard, including my own former tribe.

"In the end it was the teens from my former tribe who found me at last," Hiccup tootled out a tune on the flute in order to try to magically try to banish the annoyance which had cooled out of the rage he had felt for Astrid, when the prissy bitch had wrecked Toothless' tail-fin. "They hunted me down. Attacked me….eventually, and I only just made it out."

Hiccup sighed finally. "Oh, I miss those days….," he said wistfully, feeling the long months he had spent piling his anger against the so-called Dragon Conqueror who had wasted so many years trying to conquer his homeland without bothering to look for other avenues but to use dragons as unthinking war machines, and his enslavement of him, Hiccup, and the dragons without even trying to better himself. His anger against the arrogant Chinese people who followed the Conqueror unthinkingly, especially that bastard General who wouldn't just shut up and go away.

If anything happened to either of those two men, well Hiccup would not be really sorry. And for a man who liked to think of himself as an idealist even if he was a pirate, that was saying a great deal.

"Those days were so simple. Plunder. Battle. Escape," Hiccup laughed before his expression became more thoughtful. "I did all three of them. When I left the archipelago, I still did it. Even around in some areas of Asia. But those are stories for another time."

Hiccup stood up, wincing from the cramp in his legs and peeked outside. "Hmm. Dark out," he muttered thoughtfully before he turned back to the dragons, and he held up his flute. He sat down again and tootled on the flute for a bit. He had no desire to make the journey back to the place he'd been given. He had never felt truly comfortable there, especially since the General periodically subjected it to searches.

No, he would rather stay here.

At least here, he would be with his fellow slaves, pining away for their freedom.


	5. Chapter 5

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon. I'd wanted to upload a lot of work I've been - well working on for a while for Christmas. I barely made it.

Merry Christmas - and I hope you enjoy reading this story.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

Once he saw the dragons turning their gaze towards the gate and he heard the sound of shouting coming from behind, Hiccup only needed to turn his head so only his good eye could see what he knew was behind him to see his worst thoughts confirmed; the General was back.

Hiccup turned around and frowned again as he took in the sight of a few of the Dragon Conqueror's soldiers -well, okay there were thirty of them - riding the dragons around slowly, getting the feel of them in much the same way as they would with horseback riding; Hiccup had been allowing the dragons to be ridden by the humans, but they were not bonded to each other in the same way Hiccup had bonded with Toothless. In any case for his plans to succeed, there should not be a bond. Hiccup had drummed it into the heads of the dragons - not literally, of course - to pretend to form alliances with the different soldiers.

When their plans were realised, it would be too late for them to do anything.

Hiccup actually felt they'd done very well since he had opened up the arena for the dragons to ride with humans. Truth be told, Hiccup actually rather enjoyed the sight of the Chinese soldiers, so self-assured and usually confident and completely arrogant, look nervous and frightened. He knew why of course - they were so used to dragons being monsters that were fun to dress up as but not to live with and they were used to carrying their weapons but for these initial tests, Hiccup had insisted on the soldiers removing their weapons.

The soldiers and their precious General had not liked that.

Not one little bit.

But that was weeks back, and he had been making excellent progress so he was slightly bemused by why the General was coming to him now. But then like many things the General did, Hiccup just preferred to shut off his brain and let the idiot yak on and on.

Hiccup closed his eye in frustration when he heard the Chinaman's angry heaving from behind and he turned around quickly. "What do you want?" Hiccup asked.

"Why are there only a handful of my men?" the General snapped. "There should be more of them here by now."

"I am giving the dragons time to get used to your men. I can't do that with a battalion of them, can I? In any case, I want to take this slowly without causing the dragons too much stress."

"You always have an excuse, Trainer," the General snorted.

"It's my job, didn't you know?"

The only response Hiccup received for his sarcastic retort was a glare. "Do not take that tone with me, Trainer!" the General's reply was snapped back at him before he became calmer with effort. "How long before you begin training more of my men?"

"In another fortnight I will have more men," Hiccup hid his smirk, but he needed to take a step back when the General's hand went to his sword.

"A fortnight?!" the General hissed in disbelief.

Hiccup looked at the man's hand as it clenched and unclenched around his sword worriedly for a minute, but he breathed a slow sigh of relief when the General seemed to realise he had almost gone too far and let go of the sword before he made a really bad mistake.

"Yes. A fortnight," Hiccup said slowly. "A fortnight…does it really seem so bad, considering I have been doing this for months now. A fortnight is not going to hurt."

"That is not good enough!"

Hiccup raised an eyebrow. "If you have such a problem with the time, maybe you shouldn't have forced those soldiers into the compound three weeks ago; those morons antagonised the dragons so much they were unresponsive and agitated for days."

"How dare you speak to me in that manner-!"

"I don't give a damn how I speak to you!" Hiccup snapped, wishing once more he had a little more strength in his frame; while he had developed his strength and speed after he'd left Berk, he had always been frail in comparison to other Vikings, but the good news was he was stronger and tougher than this fool, but he just wanted to pummel the man's head to drum some sense into him. "If anybody's slowed me down since I took over the training program, it's you! You keep coming to me expecting me to train dragons as soon as possible, but you won't stop harassing me and letting me do my job."

The General's already narrow eyes narrowed even more. "The Conqueror wishes for you to train the dragons for his army. For that to happen they must be reliable mounts."

Hiccup stayed very still as he took in the other man's statement, irritated by the comparison between horses and dragons. Dragons were nothing like horses, they were more intelligent and they were more temperamental. But Hiccup was annoyed these people were pressuring him into training dragons like they were horses and expecting instant results.

The Dragon Conqueror had shown greater patience than his General, at least outwardly. Hiccup had the suspicion the Conqueror was using his general to move things along but there was little Hiccup could do about that since he was going as fast as he could.

"And they will be, but if you keep causing these setbacks, how will I get the dragons trained?" Hiccup pointed out.

The General spluttered and he took another step forward. "You will have the dragons ready for my men by the end of this week, understood? If you fail, there will be consequences."

Ordinarily, Hiccup wouldn't have cared much about the threats from the General since they were mostly full of hot air anyway. And yet at the same time, he was very cautious as a result since his own freedom was at stake much like the dragons.

"A week!" the General hissed before he walked away while Hiccup stared after him darkly with his only remaining good eye.

XXX

_Hiccup winced as the heavy metal chains were pulled by the soldiers towards one of the rooms in the palace, although he paid them no heed since he was more busy concentrating on keeping himself upright since the soldiers were yanking him around and he was keeping a watch on his surroundings to properly really offer the soldiers any sarcastic remark; he had learnt how to ignore those who mocked him over the years, but ever since he had left the Barbaric Archipelago, Hiccup had learnt the easy way to keep quiet. _

_He understood everything they were saying, of course - he had picked up enough of basic Chinese on his earlier travels before he had arrived in the country, but he didn't think it was worth retorting to. _

_As he passed the rich, ornate corridors, Hiccup couldn't help but admire the design since it was in many ways better than some of the other designs he had seen in China before. _

_Whomever he was going to meet, they were powerful and rich. _

_And they didn't have any qualms about him being shoved into a dungeon for a good few days, probably to soften him up for something big. Hiccup had no idea how long he had been locked inside the dungeon, and since the soldiers who had given him food and water hadn't really spoken to him or provided him with any information; they had simply done their job, and they had left the cell. _

_Strangely they hadn't tortured him nor had they injured him. They had been silent, that alone made him suspicious, but he knew they needed him for something. Why else would they take him alive when they had murdered so many other good people?_

_Hiccup grunted as he was pulled into a massive room with what appeared to be a red carpet in front of a throne. Sitting on it was a Chinaman wearing rich, ornate robes. By his side, wearing armour, was another man who was clearly someone important in the army. Both men were calm and silent as Hiccup was pulled into the room with the chains clinking. _

_Hiccup grunted again as he found himself forced on his knees, but as he moved around to make himself comfortable he went still when he heard the slow grinding sound of someone pulling a sword out of a sheath, and he felt the cool, sharp feel of the sword against his cheek. The sharpened metal was nowhere near his throat, but Hiccup knew it only needed to be either moved closer to his Adams Apple or swung around his head. _

"_You are the Dragon Rider?" the ornately robed man asked. _

_Hiccup didn't reply although instinctively he knew he should reply, with the sword against his cheek he didn't dare open his mouth. _

"_Answer him!" the armoured man snapped._

_But the ornately dressed man sighed and waved a hand. The signal made the soldier who was holding the sword at his cheek remove the sword, and back away, allowing Hiccup to breathe out with relief but he knew the danger was far from over. _

"_Well, are you the Dragon Rider?" the ornately dressed man asked again. _

_Hiccup nodded. _

"_Answer me properly!" _

"_Yes. I am," Hiccup didn't see the need to be asked such an obvious question because the soldiers would have seen him riding Toothless when he had tried to defend the village. Speaking of which… "Why did you destroy that village? The people were not a threat to you."_

_The ornately robed man stood up slowly and walked over to where Hiccup was kneeling. "The method of capturing you was…wasteful. But I wanted the officers in my army to see the power of the dragon. The only way they could see that was if they fought you in battle."_

_Hiccup found the answer was a bit too pat to be realistic, but he filed it away for now. "W-why did you want them to meet me in a battle in the first place?"_

"_I wanted them to see what I have known for a long time," the man replied. He walked away from Hiccup and his men, and headed over to one of the wall-to-ceiling windows surrounding the room and rested his hands on the rail. "I was five or six when my grandfather and a group of young men from our town headed out and killed a dragon. A few days later, it was destroyed. Burnt to the ground. The dragon that had been killed was the attacking dragon's mate."_

_Hiccup lowered his head sadly, feeling more sympathy for the dragons than for the people of the town. What did they expect? If they attacked the mate of a dragon, the other would feel nothing but despair and an overwhelming surge of vengeance. Dragons were highly intelligent, social creatures, but the thing human beings simply did not understand was they just wanted to live their lives in peace._

_Hiccup simply couldn't grasp why. Sure, growing up on Berk, listening to the Viking elders go on and on and on about how dragons were vicious, unfeeling, emotionless demons who loved violence although truthfully all they had done was steal food rather than truly fight battles against the Vikings. Okay, so Hiccup had heard during his travels in the Archipelago, especially after he'd left Berk some Vikings had attacked nesting ones, dragons with hatchlings and slaughtered the lot, only to be wiped out in turn. Again, it was simply a matter of getting what should have been expected. _

_The robed man went on - Hiccup guessed he was somebody of great importance, but he knew he wasn't in the presence of the Chinese Emperor; he had flown over the capital city, and he knew this was not it. _

"_When I saw the power of the dragon, how it burnt the town to the ground….it filled me with horror. For many years, the people of my country have seen dragons as demonic beasts" the man said. _

_Hiccup sighed. He had encountered that particular mindset before. "But when I saw the soldiers load the larger crossbows and fire them toward the dragon, it swooped out of the way. I remember gasping in awe at the power. For years, I aided the Emperor of China in ruling and dominating the country. I had served as one of his generals until we had forged a mighty empire. But I wanted something grander than he did. The Emperor did a great thing in forging the country into one, but I felt it was not enough. I wanted to go further, and I did. I forged my own army, my own city where we could produce a great navy. We had the power, the intellect, and the technological capability to take our Empire further," the man paused for a moment. "We opened ourselves to traders, usually from other parts of the world; there had been other traders, of course over the decades, but because of the divisions between the states we had little information to go on, but when China was united, we learnt a great deal. They told us stories of another Empire to the west which could rival our own._

"_Unfortunately, we needed something more. An army or a navy is one thing, but we needed a greater power. The power of flight. The dragons have this power of flight, and I have been working for a long time to harness it. And yet….there was nothing but failure. No matter how often we try, the dragons refuse to be tamed. Many of my scholars state it isn't possible to fly a dragon, and I had begun to believe them."_

_Hiccup kept very still as he was starting to work out where all of this was leading up to. _

"_Imagine, therefore, my surprise," the robed man turned around, smiling at Hiccup now, although the chained up rider thought it looked more like a leer than a smile, "when I hear rumours of a man who flies on a dragon. Not only that," he paused for dramatic effect, "but he is a Norseman. I thought your kind were at war with them?"_

"_Not all of us," Hiccup carefully needed to school his expression to show that little crack hadn't affected him; he didn't like the way this man had described the people from his part of the world like they were a form of inferior life, which they probably were to him. Hiccup sighed. "So, don't tell me, let me guess. You heard what I could do, but you needed to get it confirmed, and when you did you ordered my capture?"_

_People were so predictable. As the man had been speaking of seeing the power of the dragon, seeing how swift they were in the air, and how he had wanted power for himself, Hiccup had known what was coming. _

_Truthfully, he asked himself time and time again, why was it everywhere he went, there was always someone like this guy and someone like Alvin waiting in the shadows, waiting for the power the dragons possessed. It had always made Hiccup feel physically sick. He had grown up on Berk, he had seen so many dragon raids back in the day where he hadn't even seen the look of fear in Toothless' eyes when he had playing around with those stupid inventions designed to bring down a dragon only for something to go hideously wrong, but the point was he wasn't stupid. He knew how dangerous dragons could be, he had seen them in action, and he had ridden Toothless into battles many times even if it was the last thing he had wanted to do. _

"_Yes," the man replied, still wearing that unappealing smile Hiccup's way but then his expression became a little more solemn. "Think about it; out there in the world, there is so much chaos, conflict. How many empires do you imagine are out there, Dragon Rider? Ten, twenty, a million? And yet, all of them incapable of keeping order. Worse, new empires rise and old ones follow all the time. Each new one bringing with it, new technologies to overshadow the previous reign. But imagine an empire where the _air _itself is conquered, where battles are decided not by the strength of an army, or with a fleet of ocean-going ships, but with the power of the dragons used in the battles? The dragons have this power, whereas we humans cannot fly. Imagine how it would be under the united vision of one man."_

_**I think you are insane, thinking you can conquer the whole world using dragons, **__Hiccup thought to himself, but he wasn't stupid enough to say those words out aloud. _

_He knew something bad was about to come from the man's mouth. _

"_And you can help."_

_Yeah. That was what he had been afraid of. If he received a piece of gold for every time someone came up with this kind of plan and offered him a place in this new world order, then Hiccup had no doubt he would not need to be a pirate who used a dragon. _

_He was right. _

_These idiots really were predictable. This mess was virtually almost identical to the mess he'd found himself in when Alvin had captured him, although he hoped he didn't get badly injured again, somehow he doubted these people would go so far. This man had after all claimed, not in many words, they'd never been able to tame the dragons sufficiently enough to train them but with him around to help them progress into the field, they would get there and realise their dreams a lot faster. _

_The dragons of China disliked humans. Hiccup couldn't blame them, especially after he had witnessed personally how the Chinese treated them as deities, but also feared and hated him to the point where gangs of hunters ran up and down the country to __**stop the dragons before they kill us, **__a mindset Hiccup had seen virtually everywhere he went. _

_But even if the dragons were captured and were forced to have children who didn't know anything about human-dragon relations, Hiccup knew the Chinese didn't have the same mindset he himself had had when he had first met Toothless the Night Fury back on Berk. They would still see the hatchlings as monsters, and Hiccup could see it now in his mind; dragons forced to nest and produce young, only for the young to be taken away, abused and twisted by human soldiers who called themselves 'trainers' but were nothing more than thugs. _

_Hiccup pictured the same hatchlings, abused, scared and mistreated, enslaved and forced to fly over cities. They would swoop down and burn it, he could already hear the sounds of people screaming as they burnt to death, or being forced to watch as their families, their friends, their lives were being snuffed out. _

"_What makes you think I'm going to help?" Hiccup asked, looking the ornate robed man right in the face. _

_The man's smile disappeared while the armoured man who'd been standing next to his throne reared back slightly and glowered at Hiccup. _

"_What you want is impossible. Even if you raise an army of dragons to serve you, how long would it be before somebody else finds a way of doing the same thing, fighting you in a war? What will happen then?" Hiccup challenged the robed man. "In any case, if you wanted to conquer the world, then why did you let the Emperor build that stupid wall?"_

_Hiccup had been awed and impressed with the Great Wall; stonemasonry wasn't his field or forte, blacksmithing was, but even he knew enough to know it was a superb and fantastic feat of engineering and skill. Built after the wars with which the Emperor would use to take over the country, the Great Wall was one of the greatest feats of engineering Hiccup had ever seen. Miles and miles of unbroken wall, built and conceived to surround China, guarding it against its enemies. _

_But he had also heard the dark side of the construction of the wall. How slaves who'd been forced to work on the project had been worked to death, and their bodies were used to prop the wall up. It was sick. _

_When Hiccup had heard that, he had begun asking himself something very pertinent. _

_Was the Great Wall designed to keep people _out, _or rather was it designed to keep the inhabitants in? _

_Hiccup didn't know a great deal about the Chinese Emperor. Everything he had learnt about him was just a few secondhand accounts, stories of the man. In the village he had been staying in with Toothless, Hiccup had actually met a former soldier who had been on the opposing side in one of the Emperor's civil wars for dominance over the land which would become China. _

_The Emperor had been in power for a long time. To the rest of the country, he was seen as a less bombastic version of Stoick the Vast, but he was nonetheless praised for being a great leader. Children grew up hearing of the valiant deeds, heard all of the stories of the chaotic period in which the Emperor had been born into, and believed him to be a hero. _

_The soldier, however, had long since resigned himself to being a farmer. He was one of the luckier ones to have survived the wars, survived the building of the Great Wall, but what he had seen would haunt him to his grave. He had told Hiccup that the stories of the Emperor which were glowing with valour were a myth. _

_The soldier knew the truth. The Emperor of China was a tyrant. He had ordered the execution, the mass slaughter of villages and towns. The soldier had witnessed it several times when the Emperor had crossed into the provincial territory the soldier himself had been born into. And for what? For a murderer who wanted to cement his hold on the growing empire, to show everyone the price of what happened if they stepped out of line while he forced them to become his subjects. _

_For years, the soldier had seen the land changing around him. He had no idea if he was the only one left alive who knew the truth, or if there were other lucky survivors of the building of the Great Wall and had only just managed to survive, their deeds of defiance washed away as if the very nation the Emperor had built had forgiven them since they had helped him create China. He had witnessed the way the Emperor's government had rewritten history itself, proving once more the victors inevitably wrote the history books, while at the same time spreading propaganda about the Emperor's deeds. _

_Hiccup remembered the long nights he had spent listening to the man. He knew from the hollow look in the old man's eyes they were the truth, and they filled him with dread, and a deep-seated desire to stay as far from the capital city of the Chinese Empire as he could get. _

_Hiccup knew he was crossing a line, and as he felt the hilt of a sword crashing into the back of his neck and sent him to the ground for his 'insolence' he knew he had certainly crossed it. Stars exploded in front of Hiccup's eyes as he felt his head feeling like it had been split open by an axe, and he felt himself falling forward. _

_But the ornately robed man chuckled to himself while he looked down at Hiccup. "Such defiance," he commented mildly, a mild smile playing on his lips as he chuckled with easily recognisable sadism. "In time you will do as you are told. Take him away to the cells. But don't kill or maim him, just make his stay excruciating."_

_As Hiccup was picked up and dragged out of the room, he knew that unlike with Alvin and the Outcasts, this wouldn't be easy for him to get out of. As he was pulled into the cells, waiting for the first of many torture sessions, Hiccup quickly thought of what he could do, measuring his options on what he could do. _


	6. Chapter 6

The Dragon Conqueror.

_If there was one thing, just one thing, that he was truly grateful towards Berk for, ironically enough, it was the fact the twins and Snotlout had beaten him up so much he'd eventually built a tolerance towards pain. Snotlout was slightly stronger than the twins, although combined they were more than a match for him even in his more arrogant moments, but his blows had the capacity to knock him out for a while, and the abuse he'd gotten from Stoick had only made it easier for him to manage the pain although that mess with the Outcasts had pushed him to the limit. _

_Sadly Hiccup was beginning to see the pain he'd endured in the Viking part of the world was nothing compared to what he was going through right now. _

_The Chinese were more creative than their Viking counterparts. Their calmer demeanours had given them a thirst for knowledge Vikings simply didn't have, and as a result, they had developed a knowledge of the body and its weak points. In another time Hiccup would have been fascinated, and indeed he had learnt a few Tai Chi exercises which felt liberating, but right now Hiccup wished he were anywhere else since the Chinese were using that same knowledge to torture him._

_For a start, Hiccup hadn't had the chance to get to sleep for…he had no idea how long. He had been shoved into a cell where the soldiers would come in, beat him up while they yelled obscenities until Hiccup wished he had the physical strength to literally crush their heads into pulp. For a man who didn't particularly like violence originally and had needed to adapt to the world in order to survive, wishing that was something. _

_The sleep deprivation, aside from slowly but surely doing something to him mentally since Hiccup had never felt like this in his entire life even in his worst moments, had affected his mood; suddenly he was throwing insults and threats at the soldiers, which was out of character for him since he never said anything like what he'd said, and he had also told the soldiers precisely what he thought of the Chinese people, their country, and he'd even made some comments about their ancestors. _

_Bad idea. _

_Hiccup had been pummelled so badly he'd needed to be taken to a healer when the soldiers realised their mistake. Unfortunately, the sleep deprivation had made it virtually impossible for him to remember the details, and later on when he looked back on the events leading up to the beating he'd taken he'd remember virtually nothing and he'd also have problems remembering other details of his past. _

_After the incident, Hiccup had been allowed to have some sleep; he was sure the warlord who led the city and the soldiers here had heard of what had happened and had made sure it never happened again especially if his brain turned to mush. _

_So the Chinese had returned to the tried and true methods of torture although their natural ingenuity made it extremely painful for him. Hiccup's arms and legs were covered in angry red slashes; honestly, he believed the so-called 'death by a thousand cuts' would be worthy of the Viking mind even though the Vikings had their own gory means of torture and execution even if the Blood Eagle was pretty finite. _

_Hiccup had heard of this torture/execution method before. Delicate slashes across the body, one after another and deep enough to let blood trickle out until you bled to death, but Hiccup knew they were not trying to kill him even if it felt like they were considering what they had done. The Chinese were trying to break him by using one of the worst torture methods they knew about, but they were not going to let it too far. Hiccup knew that, he knew they needed to keep him alive, and that he was the only one who could train dragons for them to use. _

_Still, the pain was unbearable. But it was horrendous (no pun on his name intended) feeling the slashes on his skin, that was bad enough, but when it was mixed with salt and other chemicals although he didn't know which ones, and thrown onto his exposed, bleeding skin, it hurt even worse and they flogged him repeatedly in order to make the pain far worse. _

_But the worst of it was Hiccup knew he couldn't keep this up much longer. The more he refused, the more likely the Chinese would kill him. What made it worse was he could see it happening unintentionally. _

_Finally, when his torturers left him again alone in his cell, Hiccup took a few minutes to think while he tried to breathe through his ragged vocal cords - he had screamed with each moment his tormentors had worked on him, and he felt tired and was now in agony while he gasped out in a croaky voice which felt like his throat was being stripped of its flesh with each breathe. _

_Hiccup walked over shakily to a bucket of water the soldiers had left in his cell to clean himself out but also to drink from. Planting his shaking hands on either side, Hiccup tried to lift it but he found out very quickly he didn't have the strength in his hands. With a sigh, Hiccup placed his hands into the bucket and cupped them so he could scoop handfuls of water into his mouth. _

_The water tasted brackish, but he didn't care as he swallowed and it soothed his ragged throat. The brackish taste soon tasted metallic as the blood from his injuries began to trickle into the water, but he ignored that as well as he kept drinking. When he felt he had drunk his fill, Hiccup slowly used his hands to try to wash himself of the blood and the sweat from the torture session. Blood trickled down his arms and chest, and he ground his teeth as he tried to stop himself from wincing with each touch of the slashes. _

_Hiccup swayed on his feet, looked down at the floor squinting with his one good eye and sighed. He had no idea just how much blood he'd lost, but he knew it had been more than enough. It took Hiccup a while to clean himself up although he knew the Chinese would be sending in healers to properly see to his injuries but the healers would need time to arrive since they had no idea how long the torturers would take to finish with him, but when he was finished he hoped he looked presentable enough, although why he bothered he didn't know. _

_Hiccup sat down heavily on the bunk, not caring one little bit if he got some blood on the rags which served as a bed. He couldn't go on like this. He knew it; the warlord who'd ordered his torture had given the order to make him relent, and the longer he refused to cooperate, the more likely he was going to die. _

_Within the first few days of his torture, though, Hiccup had come up with a plan. _

_Granted, it wasn't the best well thought out plan in the world, but it was all he could think about. The best thing about the plan was it was incredibly basic. The Warlord wanted to use dragons in order to conquer the world so he could gain power for himself, but what if he took advantage of that and trained the dragons to launch an attack on the warlord and his entire city, although he wouldn't do that until the warlord was lulled into a false sense of security? _

_Training the dragons wouldn't be a problem; Toothless had been the major breakthrough for Hiccup, and thanks to the time he'd put into learning more about dragons in between those shifts at the Forge, and when Gobber was teaching him and the others in the Kill Ring, his knowledge of dragons had grown and grown. Things Vikings had never learnt about dragons were finally at his fingertips…And when he had left Berk, and travelled around even before that mess with Astrid and the other Berkians at Nadder's Point, Hiccup had met other dragons, and he had befriended dozens of them and recorded the experiences in journals he'd kept on him ever since. He hadn't stopped that simply because he'd become a pirate, and as he had travelled east he had encountered other dragons to add to his knowledge. _

_Hiccup had no doubt in his mind the Chinese Warlord and his disciples had likely caught some dragons already, although he hoped to Odin they hadn't been stupid enough to annoy and antagonise them. Oh, who was he kidding? He knew they had. _

_Training the dragons of China wasn't difficult if they were in the wild since he had managed to approach them, but only because Toothless had been there with him. But if they were caged up and his Night Fury was not around…_

_Hiccup sighed. He knew he had his work cut out for him, especially since he knew the dragons of this country were harassed and hunted heavily by the Chinese people despite being worshipped for reasons Hiccup surmised was because the humans hated and feared the dragons, but envied their power and grace. But in the festivals he had attended, people had gone around with those dragon costumes on, all of them depicted the dragons like gods, laughing and cheering at the decorations, and yet they were more than happy to send hunters after them. _

_Hiccup closed his eyes and shook from the blood loss. He opened his eyes quickly and tried to see if any more blood was bleeding out of his slashes, but his arms and chest were so red and the light in the cell was awful Hiccup couldn't tell for sure. _

_He hoped the healers came and soon, but it was likely they would be here soon although he had no idea how their system worked. While he waited, Hiccup used the time to think more about his plan. _

_Hiccup would be the first to admit it wasn't the best plan ever, especially since there was the obvious flaw; the Warlord would almost certainly make sure he took on someone as an apprentice, or more likely he would have people placed in the training place to watch his techniques and, as Gobber would say, learn on the job. _

_After that…Hiccup knew he would be expendable. At the moment he knew the warlord and his followers were torturing him but ensuring he had enough life in his slashed and beaten body because they needed him, but there were no doubts at all in his head they would kill him when he had either trained enough dragons or had simply passed on enough of his knowledge to them so they could do the job as well. _

_No. _

_There was no way he was going to die, not like this. He had refused Alvin and the Outcasts, but back then things had been different. Here, he had nothing except his wits, but it offended everything inside of him which had made him the pirate who'd flown on a dragon's back in the Barbaric Archipelago. _

_Even if the warlord was planning on killing him at the end, Hiccup felt it would be better than to just die from something as mundane as blood loss, but he would prefer to turn the tables back on the warlord and his army, still, he knew that the warlord must have at least worked out he couldn't be trusted completely. There was nothing else for it, but if he could train a few of the dragons he could cause a huge amount of damage in a short amount of time and hopefully try to find and get back to Toothless so he could leave this country once and for all. _

_Oh, just to leave…_

_Hiccup had worked out he had wanted to leave, in spite of the rich knowledge and culture of China that was still yet to be touched upon, but he just wanted to go. Ever since he had arrived in China, he had felt the hostility simply because he was different. That was nothing new for Hiccup, who had always been the most intelligent of the kids of Berk in his generation, surpassing Fishlegs and Astrid by a huge degree (he would _not _think of the blonde bitch now), despite being small, fragile and prone to sickness. But here where the Emperor had spread his prejudices as easily as he had spread his sick propaganda of how great he had made the country in spite of all the hundreds of people, the people had begun seeing themselves as superior. Sure, traders from other lands came and continued selling their wares, but they didn't stay long. Hiccup had only stayed on because the village he had stayed in the most was remote and was too distant from other towns and cities, and besides that, the townspeople had been fairly nice enough, even if they had been slightly off about his origins. _

_But now all he wanted was to leave this hostile land and go somewhere else, maybe Korea or Japan. Anywhere was better than this, and hopefully, he could finally get away from idiots with delusions of grandeur. _

_Hiccup looked up with relief when the healers came in. Despite experiencing some Chinese people's disdain and prejudices towards others, the healers seemed to have become fond of him, although he wasn't sure if that was the best description or not, he was thankful when they came in and saw the state of his body they were as horrified as he was. _

_Hiccup sat there except when he followed their instructions to the letter, and he didn't say a word as they worked to do their best to keep him alive while they cleaned the wounds he'd taken although they knew if they didn't get him to a cleaner place then the infection would probably set in. _

_The thing was Hiccup didn't realise that himself until he listened to the Healers discussing the state of his injuries, and their fears of infection. As soon as they said that, he looked into their faces. _

"_I give up," he said to them, startling them since they hadn't expected him to speak to them at all. "Tell him…," he pretended to look sorrowful as if it was making him sick to say these words, "I will train the dragons."_

_Hiccup knew this was risky, especially since the warlord would have to be beyond stupid to really think he would just join them like this, but it was the only chance he had. _

XXX

The training arena was busy since it was divided into half, on one side there was a group of soldiers and peasants. All of them were looking at the dragons on the other side with varying levels of fear; the soldiers were also petrified by the beasts, although they masked it behind their years of training. Not all of the humans were frightened by the dragons, not since Hiccup had been introducing more and more of their number into the arena so they could learn how to ride dragons. On the other side of the arena were the dragons, some of whom who had some human riders on them. Many of them were fully trained soldiers, although there were soldiers in training there as well.

Watching from the side, Hiccup was once more reminded of how optimistic he had been once about humans and dragons becoming friends. When he had first ridden his dragon, Hiccup had briefly entertained the possibility of humans like himself training and learning about dragons. He had to admit it was a compelling enough dream, but it was only a dream; certainly, the events that had taken place on Berk when he had tried to stop Stoick and the other Vikings from killing Toothless, in fact, the only thing he had achieved was by babbling about the nest and how to get there. That and the blow from his father had started to convince him only open-minded people would ever achieve the type of utopia of his dream.

But like all metal left in the open, exposed to the weather and the ocean, the sculpture endured a lot of damage.

Hiccup had originally turned the dream into a shining metal sculpture in his head, but as time had passed dents appeared. The first dents appeared when he was hit by his own father once again and disowned, convincing Hiccup Berk simply would not accept the type of peace he had in mind. More dents appeared as time passed as he saw with his cynical eyes the way Vikings continued to hound and attack the dragons, even with the war over, trapping them in Kill Rings, and sending out expeditions to exterminate the dragons they came across. It wasn't an easy task since dragons had access to places humans simply could not reach.

The metal sculpture depicting Hiccup's dream endured a battering when the Outcasts managed to capture him. More damage and rust came thanks to the injuries he had sustained, including the loss of his eye.

Like the Dragon Conqueror, Alvin's ambitions knew no bounds, but between the pair of them Hiccup had to admit he preferred the Conqueror to Alvin; unlike the Vikings who'd tried to enslave him, the Dragon Conqueror had already drawn up a number of plans that Hiccup had barely even seen whereas all Alvin wanted to do was go out and conquer without stopping or even consolidating his power grabs or making any real long term strategies in order to cope with what he might find.

The Conqueror, even though Hiccup despised him, was different. He had drawn and drafted up plans and strategies. Plans to conquer China itself while looking out towards the rest of the world, yet he knew they existed. The plans, Hiccup knew, were thorough, and they were not foolishly drawn up either since they had a number of contingencies, and Hiccup also knew that, similar to the Emperor's own rise to power, the Dragon Conqueror was aware it would take years before he would conquer the world with the dragons.

Hiccup had worked out that instead of looking at what the events of the past week, month or decade had done to the strategies that needed to be changed accordingly, the Dragon Conqueror took the opposite viewpoint, and looked at what he wanted the world to look like in years or decades to come.

That was one of the reasons why the Dragon Conqueror had been patient with Hiccup, the dragon rider often thought to himself. He knew the training of the dragons in the initial phases of his plans would take time, and couldn't be accomplished quickly since so many soldiers would need to be trained in how to control and manage them. Now the dragons were _used to _humans, the Dragon Conqueror was ensuring Hiccup had more and more new recruits, although he was curious himself why the Dragon Conqueror had ensured peasants were involved since they weren't soldiers.

A part of him felt that the Dragon Conqueror, knowing that the dragons would become a part of his people's lives, decided to educate his people of the benefits of having a dragon. In the past Hiccup would probably have been happy about that since it would make people see the different side to the dragons instead of what they were used to seeing, but now he could read between the lines.

The Dragon Conqueror was probably taking the first steps to make the dragons into slaves. The thought alone made him feel sick but it made sense given what the warlord was doing, and Hiccup had the images of dragons with humans on their backs forced to tend to fields, lifting and ferrying weights in the same way donkeys and mules carried goods from point a to point b.

Hiccup rubbed his face as he watched the training session. The dragons, as per his instructions to them, were accepting them on their backs, and although some of them were in the air being gently flown around by their mounted riders. But they were making the flights erratic and unstable although not as bad as it had been in the past, as per his instructions to reinforce the fact while they were not happy with their current predicament they were obeying him, and convincing their captors he was cooperating with them. Hiccup studied them closely, seeing if the dragons were following their instructions. He was relieved they were, but he knew they were following them simply because they knew if they didn't they would not get out of here.

He kept his features thoughtfully anxious as he walked around the arena cautiously, knowing better than to be unaware of his surroundings while there were dragons nearby. He smiled inwardly when he saw more than one dragon bucking around, but as he went to see what he could do about it to continue the facade, someone called for him.

"Trainer!"

Hiccup sighed, recognising the voice and he turned and he saw the Dragon Conqueror himself marching into the arena towards him, followed by his entourage of councillors and soldiers. Hiccup saw that while the Conqueror was beaming and pleased, the rest of the council were not as impressed although there were a few exceptions.

Hiccup walked over to the warlord, hoping this meeting was brief. He made the customary bow, hating the need to be so formal to this man who'd enslaved him and the dragons. "As you can see, master," Hiccup said, hating having to refer to this man by that title since what he was doing would definitely destroy all freedom in the world, if he succeeded, "things are going well."

The warlord expression remained neutral while he looked around the arena slowly to take in every single detail. Hiccup did notice him frown a little when he saw any of the soldiers having trouble flying the dragons, but his expression did lighten up a little as he saw the soldiers who were flying around the arena while in full control of their mounts.

"I have no doubt of that, Dragon Trainer," the warlord said at last with a smile of praise; Hiccup wasn't fooled. He had learnt during his captivity the Dragon Conqueror used a facade of charm in order to lull others into a false sense of security at moments when he either wanted answers to questions, or he would drop in concerns or criticisms.

As Hiccup expected, the Conqueror's smiling visage became more businesslike. "I am pleased with your progress recently, trainer. Never forget that. However, I must ask you to be ready to train more dragons and soldiers over the course of the next week. I want a regiment at least to have some skill with dragon riding soon."

Hiccup looked out over the arena where the training was taking place. With the way things were going, Hiccup knew it wouldn't be a problem for the warlord to get what he wanted. "I think that can be arranged," Hiccup said, hiding the true feelings he had rushing through his brain. "The dragons seem more…cooperative now."

"Yet some of them don't," one of the councillors pointed out, looking pointedly up at a dragon which was bucking its rider. Hiccup followed his gaze and saw the main problem instantly; the 'rider' was whipping the dragon.

"The idiot!" Cupping his hands to his mouth Hiccup shouted. "STOP WHIPPING THE DRAGON, YOU MORON! SHE'S NOT A HORSE!"

Unfortunately, the idiot rider either didn't hear Hiccup or they were simply too frightened by the dragon as it bucked everywhere. A stray thought crossed Hiccup's mind that the idiot on that dragon could probably see that his mount wasn't a horse since dragons were naturally more flexible than a horse, but he pushed that out of his mind completely as he stayed rooted where he was.

He felt a hand grip his shoulder and swung him around and he came nose to nose with the General, who was glaring at him angrily. "Are you not going to do anything?"

"No, look," Hiccup turned and pointed at the dragon while he pulled from his pocket a crudely carved whistle. He blew into it four times.

The reaction from the dragons everywhere in the arena was instant. They jerked their heads around to face their trainer and they instantly landed on the ground and lightly encouraged their 'riders' off of their backs. Once they were all on the ground, they stood still waiting for Hiccup to tell them what they were going to be doing next.

The bucking dragon's reaction was also instant and it landed on the ground and pushed its own rider off instantly before standing still, waiting for Hiccup like the rest of them.

Hiccup turned to the Dragon Conqueror. "I want that man out of this course. Now, before he causes a catastrophe!"

"How dare you go over my head!" the General snapped before the Conqueror could even open his mouth. "The man will stay here."

"And yet he will continue treating the dragons as horses. I am trying to teach the dragons to trust you and your people," Hiccup looked from one councillor to the next before he focused on the warlord. "So far it has worked, and there haven't been any injuries, but if you want the dragons to lash out during an attack, then go ahead and ignore my advice. Dragons respond better if you treat them with respect, not force. Even worse, these dragons need a bit more time before they become easier to ride. If that dragon was in the wild and one of your people was stupid to try that, he would be lucky not to become a pile of barbecued flesh."

The Dragon Conqueror sighed under his breath before he turned to the general in annoyance. In truth, he had become rather tired of his general and his soldiers giving Hiccup troubles. Yes, he planned to have the foreigner replaced at some later point, but not until they had all the man's secrets of dragon-riding so then their empire would never fall. But they couldn't have any of them with his general's constant interference.

"General, I want that man out of the course until he has been taught not to mistreat the dragons," he held up a hand to forestall the interruption. "Also, we need to have a private discussion in the palace."

The General shook with outrage and he glared heatedly at Hiccup before he bowed at his master.

The warlord was not looking forward to the upcoming conversation he was going to have.

Yes. The General had done a good deal to make sure the dragon training went ahead as he'd wanted since progress was slow although the warlord knew it would be difficult he had wanted to make sure the Norseman did as he was told.

But now progress was assured, the warlord was not going let anyone jeopardise it, and certainly not his general.

The Warlord sighed and turned to face Hiccup. The Norseman had been standing there, watching the exchange silently.

"So far, I am pleased with what I have seen so far. However, I want you to continue with your efforts."

Hiccup nodded. "I intend to."


	7. Chapter 7

I am so sorry it's taken so long to update, but I hope you enjoy this latest chapter. I also hope everyone is staying safe with the COVID-19 virus running rampant.

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon. Please let me know what you think.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

At the end of the week, Hiccup had a break from training the soldiers; whether or not that was because the General and his Warlord wanted to give them a break, Hiccup neither knew nor did he care.

In any case, Hiccup had the time to himself to clean out the dragon pens while the dragons themselves were out flying around the compound, which gave him the opportunity to get to work without the dragons blocking the space. The work was filthy and it took him hours to clean up the mess with a shovel and a broom to clean up the hay from one pen alone before he moved onto another.

Hiccup gasped in exertion as he hauled another full sack of used hay to the exit, and he paused for a moment to lean against the wall of the pen. From where he was standing, Hiccup could see the underside of the dome, and he smiled at the dragons as they cawed and roared in the air. He closed his eye and rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist.

He was tired. He had gotten up early to get this work done since he was the only one who'd do it; all the peasants who worked in the compound were happy to keep the fishes coming and that was as far as it went. They refused to come anywhere near the compounds, and since Hiccup was the only one who was willing to come to the pens to clean them up, the job was down to him.

But Hiccup guessed he couldn't blame them. When the peasants had first been handed the job, they had gone into the pens expecting to get the job done - Hiccup didn't really know of the finer details, but he knew that a number of the peasant workers had been killed, and more than a few were injured - and they had refused to go back.

And so the job had been handed to him. All he needed to do was wait for a month to pass so he could let the pens get really dirty and then he would arrange for a few days where he could really concentrate on the work so the dragons' living conditions were much nicer for them. Hiccup went to the water bottles he had prepared for himself. As the cold liquid trickled down his throat, Hiccup gasped with pleasure and took another sip to enjoy this break since it gave him time to think.

The training had been fairly chaotic, no thanks to the idiots who caused problems. Hiccup wondered if the General was determined to cause problems, but he was sure the General was actually making his troops take note of everything they were taught in order to stage their own power grab. He had overheard a few of the soldiers, laughing under their breaths as they had trained to ride on the dragons that they would show the warlord "true strength."

Yeah, there were a few soldiers like that idiot who'd whipped his dragons who caused problems for Hiccup since they constantly slowed things down, but overall they were getting better at flying the dragons and Hiccup had no doubt when the time came, the Warlord would be suddenly facing an enemy without any allies to protect himself or sacrifice for his own skin.

Hiccup's brow crinkled a little bit while he stood underneath the dragons, thinking about those soldiers who were slowing things down. He had noticed it from time to time, but he had dismissed it at first before he had picked up on it a few times since, and then he had heard the whispers. Hiccup didn't know for sure whether or not what the General was going to do, and while it had occurred to Hiccup to cause problems when he had realised what the General and his soldiers were planning to do by alerting the Conqueror, he had decided not to bother. He had his own plans for dealing with the Warlord and his city, and even if the revelation would likely give him a position of authority in the Warlord's ranks he didn't know for certain if it would cause problems further down the line. In any case, Hiccup had no idea for certain if the General's plans to move forward against his master would take place on the scheduled day where the Warlord would begin his conquest, or even if it would happen earlier.

Hiccup would have liked to say he didn't care, but he knew he did need to care. He didn't like the General, in fact, he hated him. The man was a fool, pompous and blustering…but he knew the General was dangerous. He was a professional soldier, and even if the man was arrogant, Hiccup knew he was politically ambitious and thanks to his military background he would see the benefits to dragons much like his boss.

But Hiccup feared what kind of things that would happen if the Warlord suddenly disappeared; the Warlord may have imprisoned and enslaved him and the dragons, but the man had given him (Hiccup) a lot of leeway. The General was a military man who was as inflexible as the Vikings Hiccup had left behind, and he demanded instantaneous results. The leeway Hiccup had received would just disappear as if it had never been there if the General took charge.

Thinking about the Vikings made Hiccup sigh, and he wondered what it said about his life in general that he would leave Berk, become a pirate flying on the back of a dragon, and travelling across much of the world only to find himself back to square one, which included another Kill Ring and a man whose inability to look beyond the point of his own nose rivalled that of Stoick the Vast himself.

In any case, Hiccup knew that the General wouldn't let him live for long, although he had little doubt the long term plan was to watch how he interacted with dragons so then they could copy him and his moves, and when they were sure he had given them what they wanted… well, Hiccup knew his life, his short life, would be ended.

The General and the Warlord may not have been on the same page, and it was so bad the General had his own ambitions which meant he would, one day, overthrow the Dragon Conqueror, but they both agreed on one thing. They didn't want Hiccup to be around for long, so whoever was in power it would make little difference since he would likely be killed before he could even put his plans into motion to find Toothless again and leave.

After a few more minutes of thought, Hiccup shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't in any real position to fight back against the two men, and in any case, since he planned to move against them and their city anyway, Hiccup didn't seen the point. But for now, he would need to just keep his head down and train the dragons and the idiot soldiers, and yet he wondered again what the point was behind the stubbornness of some of the soldiers. If the General had his own plans to take over and it required the dragons, why were they deliberately causing problems? Was it so then they could show him (Hiccup) up?

Hiccup rolled his eyes and he got back to work, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he did. He had never really been burdened with the mess the dragons had left behind in the Kill Ring on Berk even if he had, as Gobber's apprentice, ventured with the old blacksmith down into the compound of the Kill Ring (he would _not _think of Gobber; some of the memories were too good and too painful, and in any case, Hiccup dreaded to think about how the old Viking blacksmith viewed him now), but it had been so long since he had smelt the stink of the pens.

He also cursed the Chinese for their collective cowardice in just doing something like this today since the dragons were flying outside and they weren't going to bother the peasants.

It took Hiccup three hours to clean the larger pens, and he was grateful that he had managed to do so much in just one day. When he went home, his entire body would be stinking of BO, and he would be aching all over. But unfortunately, he had to wheel the whole out in a large wheelbarrow. Hiccup grunted as he heaved the messy hay out of the Training Ring, and he had to repeat the same journey again and again. When he had finished up with his tasks for the day, Hiccup rubbed the sweat out of his eyes and leaned against a wall to recover his strength.

While he leaned against the wall, feeling just how tired he was, Hiccup was tempted just to slide bonelessly to the ground and just sleep off his exhaustion although he knew he would need to keep going until he'd fed the dragons, and made sure they were comfortable for the night. Still, there was plenty of time for that.

As he was recovering, Hiccup looked around the training ring for inspiration for something to do in the meantime before it was time for him to tend to the dragons once more, and as he did so he looked up and he realised he was being watched by dozens of children.

Children?

Hiccup hadn't really had a great deal of contact with the children around here, so he didn't know why they were here. While a small part of him, admittedly a very small part, was curious if they wanted to do away with their people's traditions just like he himself had when he had stopped himself killing Toothless in the forest outside the village, before giving him the prosthetic tail-fin and then riding on him.

Unfortunately, Hiccup wasn't going to find out today.

As soon as they realised his attention was on them, the children disappeared.

Hiccup frowned for a moment, wondering what all that was about, and then he just shrugged his shoulders and got back to work.

XXX

The next day, Hiccup was once more up early. Once he'd had something quick but filling for breakfast, he was back to cleaning out the dragon pens and making sure the dragons themselves were let out into the open air of the dome. After ensuring they didn't kill each other since they were understandably frustrated by their imprisonment as he himself was, Hiccup got to work. He was eternally grateful to Thor and Odin he'd had the common sense to deal with the larger pens to get it out of the way.

While he worked, he had time to think. He was mentally counting down the days before he could finally get revenge on the Warlord who'd imprisoned him and the dragons, but he knew he would need to be careful. He planned for tonight and tomorrow to be so he could persuade the dragons to be a little bit more cooperative since he knew the more cooperative the dragons were to the Chinese, the sooner they could all escape. But he knew he would need to be careful since there was still a chance of discovery, but if he could make the dragons more cooperative by the time the training reached a higher phase, the easier it would be for him to fight back.

He wished he had Toothless with him, and for a moment he paused as he thought of his dragon. Toothless had hated being trapped in the cove on Berk for long periods, especially when he was still trying to escape following the loss of his tail-fin, but when his flight was restored, bit by bit, the Night Fury had accepted the cove as a makeshift home. Granted, although Toothless still loathed being trapped, Hiccup hadn't had any real trouble.

But here…

It was only the plan and the dragons which were the reasons Hiccup was still sane. Thor only knew how dragons who'd been imprisoned in Kill Rings for months on end, knowing they could not escape, waiting for the Vikings to kill them off in those training or practice sessions. Hiccup would not be surprised if many of them had gone mad in that time. Hiccup had once spared a thought of how Toothless would have coped in here, but he had quickly stopped; the Chinese may have tried to kill him in order to stop him from escaping himself, and there would have been little he could have done to stop it happening.

Hiccup pushed those depressing thoughts aside. He had enough on his mind as it was, enough work to do to keep him busy, and yet his mind never strayed too far from the idea.

He wondered what had happened to Toothless, and he had begun to ask himself seriously if he would ever see his Night Fury again. Hiccup guessed that was a fear that made sense, especially since he had been held prisoner by that bastard Warlord who called himself the Dragon Conqueror, but he still held out hope he would find Toothless at some point.

In any case, it wasn't as if Toothless was defenceless. He was more than a match against humans and dragons, even if the dragon breeds around here were far different, and came with other body weapons Hiccup had never seen or expected before. But one of Toothless's greatest strengths was his intelligence. He wouldn't land somewhere without being a hundred per cent certain he would be safe, but Hiccup was worried about the prosthetic he had built for the dragon.

Was it still working?

Had Toothless run into some kind of accident where the tail-fin had been damaged, or worse?

What if he had been grounded, and he hadn't been able to escape?

All of those depressing thoughts filled his mind, making it impossible for him to concentrate, and so Hiccup took a moment to stop and get his act back together so he could move on, but as he did he found another reason to stop. Those children were back, and they were watching him and the dragons as they flew underneath the reinforced dome.

Hiccup dropped what he was doing, and stood up, holding a hand over his eyes to block the sunlight so he could see them all better.

There were dozens of them, from what he could see, but he wondered why they were there.

He had his answer when suddenly the children started hurling stones and bits of rotten food at the dragons, shouting obscenities at them. Many of the dragons were in the air, and some of them were out of range of the offending projectiles but there were quite a few of them on the ground who were taking advantage of the hot sun to bathe themselves in the rich heat of the sun, and they were taken by surprise when they were hit.

"STOP THAT!" Hiccup yelled at them, watching with his good eye as the dragons, roused by the attack, looked around themselves for the source. Hiccup, who was more than aware of what an angry dragon could do, wondered if these children were incredibly stupid or just desperate to get themselves killed. He was about to usher the dragons back into the safety of their pens when the inevitable happened.

One of the more aggressive dragons in the ring was looking around furiously, his head moving so he could tell where the sounds of shouting were coming from, when he was hit in the face, making him roar with pain and rage.

The sound of the roar made Hiccup cringe, knowing what was happening and the children to stop. The dragon shot up into the air so fast he was a blur, but Hiccup and the children saw the fire.

"STOP IT!" Hiccup screamed as the children shrieked en-masse in their panic, and he rushed over to one of the other dragons, and after a few moments of persuasion, he was flown over to the dragon, who had now latched onto the scaffolding of the dome, and was trying to claw its way to the children frantically so it could burn them to death. It was roaring in frustration as it's struggling to get through the scaffolding were met with failure.

Hiccup pulled on the horns of the dragon he was riding so he could survey the scene for a moment before he acted. As he did so, he realised that the dragon was actually a female, and he closed his eyes in annoyance, cursing this particular breed for having a very nasty temper and that the females were much more vicious with their anger. This was not going to be easy, but he knew he needed to stop it. Through the gaps in the dome, he could see that the children, panicked about the dragon, had already run off, but Hiccup wondered if the dragon had burnt a few of them already. Personally he wasn't that bothered - years and years of seeing dragons abused and mistreated had hardened him and made him apathetic to a degree towards those who did them harm - but at the same time, in this case, he only knew this would cause him more and more problems further down the line, but his plan was the best one he had so far.

Hiccup was snapped out of his thoughts when he heard the calls of very angry Chinese voices. He looked around, and he groaned when he saw the group of soldiers, they were moving closer and closer to the dome.

"Stay back!" he shouted, hoping that whoever was in charge had the common sense to listen to him; their weapons were good, but the dragon was in the air, hopefully out of range, but if they harmed her then they would regret it quickly. "Let me handle this!"

But they hadn't heard him. The soldiers quickly stuck their arrows into their bows, and they unleashed a volley against the dragon. Hiccup closed his eye when he heard her roar which went through him, but he quickly reopened his eye…and he shouted in anger when he saw the dragon breathe fire down at the men.

"Come on," Hiccup cried at the dragon he was riding and flew closer. When they were close enough, Hiccup stood upon the dragon's back and after a few moments of waiting for the right moment, Hiccup jumped off of the dragon and onto the other. The dragon shrieked in surprise, but Hiccup quickly got to work soothing her.

"Calm down! This isn't doing any good!" Hiccup told her, feeling all of the hard work he had put into the training, all the planning was being washed away. He cursed the children for stoking the flames of the dragons' anger, he cursed the Chinese for imprisoning him and all the dragons in here, but he cursed himself for not bothering to properly investigate what the children wanted and guessing what they were planning to do.

The dragon roared.

Hiccup sighed, and he leapt back in reflex while he held onto the dragon's back scales to keep himself steady when an arrow smashed into one of the wing bones, but the strengthened but very tough bone did not suffer any damage.

"Idiot," he whispered before he got back to work. "Calm down," he said while he stroked the dragon's neck soothingly, hoping that he was getting through to the dragon, but with all the arrows flying everywhere and their real threat, he knew it would take a miracle to properly calm her down.

"STOP YOU FOOLS! DON'T HARM THE DRAGONS OR THE TRAINER!"

Hiccup looked down in surprise, and he sighed with relief when he saw someone….someone he had never expected to be happy to see coming in quickly. The General was running over to the soldiers, and he was shouting at them and even smacking them all to stop them. The presence of their military commander did a lot of good in stopping them, and the arrows stopped flying. Hiccup sighed, wondering at the irony of being happy to see the General intervene, but he knew he was still in for it, and he returned to stroking the dragons' neck.

"It's okay," he whispered, knowing only himself and the dragon could hear what he was saying, "calm down. It's okay. Now, we're going to be flying down to the pens together. It's over. The children are gone. They have stopped. The soldiers have stopped attacking, it's over. Come on, we can go back and when it comes to your freedom, you can go wherever you want once we've made them pay for what they've done, and their city is nothing more than a burning pile of rubble."

Hiccup directed the dragon to fly back to the ground when he was certain she was calm down again, and she wasn't going to lash out anymore, but as they flew closer to the ground, Hiccup wondered what the Chinese were going to do next….

There was no doubt in his mind they would probably try to kill the dragon; there were so many dragons in the ring held prisoner, the General wouldn't bat an eyelid at the loss of one when there were so many left. As Hiccup flew the dragon back to the ground, he hit upon an idea he hoped would work. He bent over and he whispered to the dragon his idea, keeping an eye out on the rest of the dragons in the meantime. His idea might just work…

XXX

"TRAINER!" the General shouted in anger as he marched angrily into the arena…only to pause when some of the dragons, already up in wings over the attack of the children, hissed and spat with malice.

Hiccup walked over, muttering a few calming words to each of the dragons, came to a stop in front of the General. His face was stormy with anger. "I am grateful for your help in stopping your soldiers, but don't come in here when the dragons are pissed off."

"H-How dare you speak to me like that! I shall have you-!"

"Shut your face! I am trying to stop the dragons from going mad, which you are doing by marching in here. You are in their territory now, and do you really think they really care about your soldiers being in here?" Hiccup added, looking over the General's shoulder to take in the group of soldiers who'd followed their glorious leader inside the arena.

The presence of the soldiers had roused the already angry and agitated dragons, but despite their weapons and their armour, and their natural arrogance in their own abilities, they were watching the dragons with fear, especially when the dragons collectively surrounded them and created a large natural wall all around, smoke rising from their nostrils while other dragons were preparing to use their other body weapons. Hiccup could guess what they were thinking. A sword was sharp. A spear was long and depending on the skill a dangerous weapon, and an arrow was capable of covering a large distance, but they were no match for the dragons, and they knew it, if their terrified faces were anything to go by.

The General seemed to sense the danger now, and he turned back to Hiccup, and despite his best efforts, he was completely unable to mask the fear in his expression. Hiccup was impressed; this blustering fool had never come into the arena before after the dragons had been pissed off out of their minds, so it was an experience he was enjoying.

"Well, General, what is it you want?" Hiccup asked.

The General pulled himself up to try to regain some of his control and authority, but after he'd let his fear bleed out it was unsurprising that Hiccup wasn't fooled. "Where is the dragon that attacked those children?" he demanded.

"You mean the same children who'd thrown rotten fruit and rocks on the dragons?" Hiccup countered, unwilling to back down. "And as for the dragon, what are going to do with it?"

His suspicions were confirmed when the General's face had what looked like a cross between a grimace and a smirk. It was a hideous expression that made Hiccup instantly want to grab a sword and slash off of the General's face.

"We are going to kill it. And you are going to tell us where the dragon is, right now, Trainer!"

Hiccup had to use every ounce of his self-control to stop himself from telling the dragons to attack the soldiers while allowing him to kill the General slowly. He had been able to allow the dragons out anytime he had chosen, but he wanted the entire city to be destroyed, on the very same day the Dragon Conqueror prepared for his conquest of the world.

It was the best time to defeat the Warlord. But Hiccup had been tempted, more than once over the last few months, to simply dismiss his plan, and just wipe out the city. He had thought he could handle it, playing the role of the slave, but the more time that passed he was having problems sticking to the plan as he should while he had to put up with the bigots in the city, the General and the Dragon Conqueror himself.

But Hiccup knew the best plan was the one where no-one knew what was going on until it was too late. But nonetheless, he had not been stupid enough to just depend on the one plan, and hope for the best. He had used the last few months smuggling barrels of gunpowder and bringing them here on the off chance something might happen. And he had mixed the powder with wood pulp, and a few other ingredients he had experimented with in order to make gunpowder more powerful, so he was hoping their escape would be simple. Hiccup had started doing this once he'd realised that the General had plans for the Dragon Conqueror, and he'd wondered if the General who was as power-mad as his boss would stage a coup. The powder was just insurance, placed in one of the empty pens where no-one went inside, and he had a map of the city concealed in his clothes, so when they did attack the city then he would know precisely where to hurt it the most.

"I don't know," Hiccup knew he was playing a very dangerous game; he could see just behind some of the dragons a number of soldiers bringing in what looked like cannons. No, they couldn't be serious-!

"Trainer-!"

"I seriously don't know," Hiccup said desperately, hoping the General wasn't stupid enough to go behind his master's back like this. "I saw several other dragons who were furious over what your….children did, and by the time I had finished, she had blended in with the others. I don't know which dragon she is," he argued, hoping his bluff worked.

Unfortunately, the General was in no mood for excuses. He turned around and yelled a command.

"No!" Hiccup yelled, but it was too late.

There was an almighty explosion as the cannons exploded.

"NO!" Hiccup screamed again, looking on in horror as six of the dragons, startled by the explosion, roared in pain as the projectiles of the cannons struck them all hard, killing them instantly.

"Don't do anything!" Hiccup yelled to the others, holding up his hand in the signal he had pre-arranged with the dragons to _not do anything until I say _which warred with their own desire to rip, tear, burn and melt the soldiers for what they had done. It was a testament of their bond to Hiccup they did as they were told.

But Hiccup wasn't bothered while he rushed over to the bodies of the dragons, uncaring of the soldiers, uncaring of the General in the arena. One of the dragons was still alive, and Hiccup went over to it, gently pressing a hand on its head while the life bled away from its eyes.

Hiccup exhaled slowly in horror while he felt a rising rage starting to burn within him. He had felt this anger before when Alvin's men had tortured him and mutilated him until he had only one eye. He had lashed out against every single Viking in the archipelago, with his raids on their ships and islands, combining human intelligence with dragon intelligence and power.

As he stared down at the body, unable to take his eyes off the corpse, Hiccup knew he had made a fatal mistake. He cursed his stupid plan to destroy the warlord and his army until there was nothing left but burnt-out cinders. He should have just pretended to go along with the bastards and focus on training the dragons like he was on their side before he unleashed them all when they'd been lulled into a false sense of security.

What had he done instead?

He had tried to be clever, too clever. And it had cost the lives of six dragons, wasting so much valuable time, kept him away from Toothless!

No more.

He had had enough.

"You will get back to training the dragons, Trainer," the General said, pure arrogance in his voice, filled with a mix of pleasure over what they'd done. "And you will succeed-."

"Kill all of them, but bring down the General. I want to kill him personally!" Hiccup screamed, his command echoing around the arena. "Bring me a sword!"

The dragons instantly exploded into action, their speed and power taking the soldiers by surprise. The soldiers with the cannons didn't bother to reload their weapons, they ran out, but they were brought down easily by the poisonous barbs of one dragon, who grabbed the gleaming sword he had been carrying at the time and flew it back to the waiting hands of Hiccup who had ordered one of the swords to be brought to him, and they screamed in agony as the poison burnt through their veins. The armoured soldiers who had come in with the General were attacked by the others, their screams blending with the sounds of the dragon's fire.

The General was left stumped in surprise and horror over what was happening, and he just stood there while he watched the carnage while several of the dragons flew to the dome and they breathed their fire or shot their gas at the poor devils they could find before he realised where he was, and he fumbled with his sword….but he was stunned when he felt the sharp edge of a sword at his throat. The General stiffened when he felt the razor edge, knowing he moved an inch, he would be killed instantly.

"Stop this!" the General whispered.

"You are in no position to give me commands," Hiccup was enjoying this. He pulled the sword back, making the General think he was backing down, but Hiccup slashed his throat, making the General choke in surprise as his throat started spewing arterial blood. "I had planned on destroying the entire city, but only when the _Dragon Conqueror _believed he had me in his power," Hiccup sneered at the title, making it clear what he truly thought about it while he heard the General choke to death on his blood, "but now…you've given me the perfect excuse to destroy his world, only you won't be around long to see it."

With that, the General died, and as he did he conjured an image of his long-held dreams of glory, where he was the ruler of a mighty empire forged by dragons, only now the image was black. With that, the General died.

XXX

Hiccup looked down at the corpse of the General and he cast his eyes around the arena at all the bodies of the other soldiers, wanting to tear his hair out in frustration with his own shortsightedness.

He knew this was his fault. He could have escaped ages ago, but instead, he had needed to be clever, and use the Conqueror's own schedule against him, but he could have gotten the dragons to escape long ago. And now six of them were now dead.

Giving one last frustrated shake of his head, Hiccup turned to the other dragons, his mind already working out how they could escape. He discounted the gate instantly; while it was large, it wasn't large enough for all the dragons to escape, and they would be close to the ground, and if there were any more soldiers out there, they would be waiting and they'd have an easy time killing off the dragons.

He decided to destroy the dome. It harked back to his days where the Kill Rings were destroyed on Berk, and other islands, only this time they were all going to escape.

"We have work to do," he said to them, striding over to the pens where he'd hidden the gunpowder. Some of the dragons followed, knowing what he had stored in there. Hiccup opened the gates and he strode in, and he walked over to the hay covered beds that were prepared in case more dragons were captured. In short, they were the perfect place to hide gunpowder. Hiccup threw off the hay, revealing the barrels and the lengths of coiled, strong rope lying nearby. Hiccup grabbed some of the barrels and some rope before he turned to the dragons.

"Pick up some of the barrels between you," he ordered them, "and don't forget to take up the rope. I will tie them to the dome, but you will need to take them all up. But be wary, and whatever you all do, do not breathe fire on them. No matter what. Your freedom depends on it," he said, making sure the dragons knew what was at stake.

Hiccup and the dragons worked quickly while they fixed the barrels to the frame of the dome. Hiccup used the rope to securely tie the barrels he had with him to the dome to see how difficult it was. It took him four attempts before he was able to secure the gunpowder to the dome, but when he was finished he knew precisely what to do.

Once that was done, Hiccup got the dragon he was riding to fly to the others so he could fix the dragons' burdens to the dome while they held it. As he tied the rope to the scaffolding, Hiccup found the whole act of tying the Chineses' own weapon to the dome they had built to imprison the dragons and force him to train them to conquer and destroy very symbolic, since this was their freedom he was winning.

When the final barrel was tied to the last part of the dome, Hiccup guided the dragons back and he surveyed his work while he craned his neck upwards. The gunpowder barrels were concentrated along one large section of the dome, right at the top where the scaffolding came together. Hiccup placed as many of the barrels as he could to the joints of the bars, where they were weakest although he needed to be careful with the spikes sticking out, and some of the smaller barrels had been wedged into the gaps and secured with the others. Hiccup closed his eyes, and he hoped this worked; he had another supply of gunpowder in the pens, but he didn't want to use it unless he had no choice. He held up his hand when he was sure the dragons were out of the way, but thanks to the dome it was hard for them to move since the debris - if there was any - would rain down on the ground.

"Fire!"

The dragons fired dozens of plasma bursts at the barrels. _Please work, _Hiccup pleaded, _please….!_

A loud explosion rang out through the air, making Hiccup and the dragons flinch in reflex over the volume, and it threw up a huge amount of dust from the pulverised materials used to build the dome as they collapsed to the ground now they weren't fixed. Hiccup winced, hearing the sound of wrenching metal before he winced again as he heard the impact.

Ignoring the dust although it bothered his only eye, Hiccup looked at the dragons. They were all looking at him expectantly, wondering what their next move is.

Hiccup smiled at them grimly. "Let's get out of here. We're going to destroy the city tonight!"


	8. Chapter 8

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon, the drill should be familiar to you by now.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

The Warlord was in the middle of eating his - tested - lunch, calmly and mentally reviewing all of his plans while at the same time going over all the paperwork in front of him. The Dragon Conqueror knew it was not good etiquette to read at the table, but he didn't care. His reputation as a shrewd, knowledgeable ruler of this part of China partly came from his knowledge of everything going on around him.

Many of the reports came from the spies he had sent out there to monitor the populace. There were hundreds of them, forming a network throughout the country, like a giant spider web, with him at the centre. Through the network, the Dragon Conqueror knew what his allies and his enemies were doing. Thanks to the spies, he had forged his little empire. They had helped him to prevent his longterm plans from reaching the ears of the Emperor himself, and he had little doubt in a short amount of time, the network would grow larger and larger.

Some of his spies were closer to home, and their information kept him appraised of everything happening around him. Even minor events in the city, which never reached the public ear and eye reached him eventually, although he had a secret weapon there. Many of his hours were spent going through the reports, while late at night he would change into a different set of clothes and venture out into the city itself where he could eavesdrop on his citizens, allowing him a much greater insight into things that were going on around him.

Thanks to that method of information gathering, the Dragon Conqueror was able to determine what was the truth and what were the lies in the reports. Thanks to those nightly explorations, the Dragon Conqueror was more than aware of the treacherous plans of his General, although he wondered when the traitor was going to make his move, guessing the General would put his coup into effect just after he had begun conquering the world with the dragons.

He wasn't surprised.

The treachery made sense; he knew ambition when he saw it, and he knew the General was truly ambitious. He just lacked the raw hunger of real men who became powerful, men like the Dragon Conqueror himself and the Emperor, who had conquered the land of China, uniting it under one banner instead of it being separated into chunks, ruled by kings who were constricted by the boundaries of their kingdoms.

The General was pathetic, at least in the opinion of the warlord. He had a spark for his plans, but they were pathetically limited in scope and he lacked the insights to what truly made an empire great.

He would die, of course. The only problem was he would need to wait for the right opportunity while hoping the General was not expecting him to know of his plans.

The Warlord had known of them for a while, but that didn't mean the General wasn't hiding a streak of cunning like a rat.

He was just getting into his when suddenly a soldier came rushing in, fighting off two of the palace guard as he came rushing into the room. The sudden noise roused and surprised the Warlord, and he leapt to his feet, his meal forgotten while he glared in outrage at the intruder, reassured by the short swords he had hidden underneath his robes, which also hid the light chainmail vest he wore for protection. As he stood to his full height, adopting a fighting stance while the rest of his palace guard who protected him around the clock, he recognised the figure as the General's second in command. For a moment the Warlord was puzzled by the manner in which he entered, but as he took a closer examination while the second in command kept crying, he realised he was looking at burn marks on the soldier's uniform and armour, and there were fresh wounds on the man's face.

"Let me go!" the soldier screamed while he wrestled with the guards. "I need to speak to him-!"

The Warlord wanted answers and he wanted them now before things spiralled out of control. The soldier looked on the point of madness, and he couldn't have that.

"Wait!" he called, throwing his arms out to stop the struggle. "Let him go!"

"But, Lord-!" one of the guards protested, but the Warlord wouldn't have it. "You heard me. Let him go. But stand behind him if he should try to assassinate me," he added to appease the guards, and let them know their duty and their devotion to it was not something he dismissed.

The palace guards let go of the soldier, who instantly rushed to the Warlord, and he crashed to the ground in a rather sloppy bow. The Warlord ignored it, seeing for himself the man was bursting at the seams with his news to really care for the proper etiquette. While he bowed, the palace guards took their positions and hefted their weapons, while another guard came to stand close in front of the Warlord to act as a human shield in case the soldier used his current position to throw a dagger.

But the soldier threw nothing.

He lifted his head, his breath coming out in short, hoarse gasps as if he had been running to the palace without stopping. "Lord, the dragon trainer has betrayed us!" he gasped out, struggling for breath.

The Warlord gasped, his mind racing feverishly as he struggled to believe what he had just heard. "What do you mean, he's betrayed us?" he asked while his mind came up with a number of bad ideas.

"He ordered the dragons to kill the General, and a small detachment of soldiers. He'd somehow gotten hold of some of our gunpowder, and used it to level the dome, allowing the dragons and himself to escape!"

The Warlord growled under his breath. He had despatched several of his aides to investigate the sounds of a series of loud explosions that were distant but were in the direction of the training dome, worried that the dragons he was having trained were harmed. "How did he get the gunpowder?" he ordered angrily, while he turned to one of his remaining aides, and summoned him over with a harsh wave while he wondered why he hadn't known about this beforehand himself.

"I do not know, Lord," the soldier replied.

The Warlord growled again before he turned to the aide. "I don't care how many people you need," he snarled at the unfortunate man, "I want every single one of our gunpowder stores to be checked against their last recorded inspection results. Is that clear?" he snapped in a voice that made it very clear to the aide the answer had better be a clear yes.

The aide bowed his head and quickly rushed out of the room to follow the order while the Dragon Conqueror turned back to the soldier. "Tell me everything you know about what happened, but know this…if I find you are lying to me, I will have you executed after being tortured for a very long time," he threatened.

After what the soldier had seen, being tortured and executed was hardly a threat. He began speaking slowly, but just fast enough for the warlord to understand him clearly. "It began when a large group of children began throwing things into the dragon enclosure, Lord," the soldier began, "myself and the General were busy inspecting the troops assigned to keep watch over the compound when it happened. One of the..the…projectiles," he paused at the word, saying it uncertainly since he wasn't entirely clear himself what it was the children had thrown at the beasts, "hit one of the dragons, and it went berserk. It attacked the children, frightening them. The General mobilised the guard while the trainer rode a dragon up to the raging monster to calm it down."

The Dragon Conqueror was listening to the story with growing worry, but he kept listening as he tried to work out just how far the dragon trainer had betrayed them. "Go on," he ordered.

"The soldiers tried to attack the dragon, but the General stopped them. We watched as the dragon trainer calmed the beast down, and rode it back down with the one he was riding. The General and a group of soldiers went into the enclosure. He was concerned about another incident like that happening again, so he wanted to kill the dragon. I was watching from the top of the dome. I couldn't hear the argument, but it looked and sounded as if the General was trying to find the dragon, but the trainer refused."

"That was the trainer's job," the warlord reminded the soldier. "I wanted those dragons to be trained in order to help conquer the world. What happened then?"

"It is as I said, Lord, the trainer refused to allow the General to find the dragon so the General killed a small number of dragons to punish the others."

The Dragon Conqueror stiffened with growing rage as he listened to the growing horror story.

"And then the trainer went mad. He screamed at the dragons to kill the soldiers the General took with him into the enclosure, and to bring the trainer a sword, and they did. The trainer slit the Generals' neck after saying something to him for a few minutes," the soldier went on in one quick breath. "I rushed back here to inform you of what had happened, but on the way, I heard an explosion. When I turned my head, I saw the dragons coming out from the dome."

"The fool!" the Dragon Conqueror snarled. "The fool _knew _the trainer's history, and yet he continued to antagonise him. Well, he has paid the ultimate price for his stupidity."

"Lord?" the soldier looked up into his leader's face with surprise.

"Hiccup, the dragon trainer, was a pirate at one time. I've even heard the stories of his attacks on several of our junks in our sea. According to the stories, he rode on a black dragon which belongs to a breed only indigenous to the part of the world he and the Vikings come from," the warlord explained, "I had always known it was dangerous to think he would drop being a pirate and would serve us, I had him watched very carefully in case he plotted against me. Once a pirate, always a pirate. In any case, Hiccup is far from stupid. He has an intelligence many of us lack, and he can see things we cannot. And yet the General was foolish enough to think he could kill dragons in his presence," the warlord shook his head before he noticed the soldier was looking at him with disbelief.

"We have had a pirate train the dragons?"

"Yes. I would have preferred the expertise of someone whom we could break to our will, and while I knew he would likely be treacherous I had made plans to kill him while forming contingencies in case something like this happened."

"What is your will, Lord?"

The Dragon Conqueror was thinking feverishly, trying to pretend that he knew what he was doing. Like many self-contained men, the warlord liked his world to be orderly and whenever something occurred to sabotage it, he was left reeling at the news of what he had just heard.

His general was dead.

The dragons were free.

Hiccup had killed the general, and he had freed the dragons. The Dragon Conqueror's mind was now racing as he tried to think of a way they could handle this problem. He was not surprised by the news now it had happened, knowing of the antagonistic relationship between his general and Hiccup. In truth, he had expected something to happen between them, but he had expected it to happen quite early given what he knew of pirates and their reputations for brutality and treachery, and the warlord had prepared for it.

But no. The young dragon rider had actually been courteous in comparison to what the warlord believed was the typical pirate. Naturally, the warlord was suspicious, concerned by the rider's seeming nonchalance even if he was visibly annoyed by the General's bullying, and while the General had done it mostly by the orders of the warlord himself to get the dragon training underway when it became clear things were going too slowly for his liking.

But the dragon pirate had done nothing. He hadn't lashed out. He hadn't killed any of the soldiers. He hadn't tried to escape. At first, he had concerned and suspicious. He had had Hiccup watched for any sign of deception, any hint of him trying to escape or any plan on the dragon pirate's part to destroy the plans he had spent so long working to make an achievable reality, then the warlord would have had him killed. He had formed the contingency with the General, but it was only to be used in the gravest of emergencies.

As much as the idea of having a pirate train dragons was worrying enough since there was the chance of betrayal, they had no choice since Hiccup was the only one who knew anything about riding dragons. Killing him would have been detrimental to the plan to conquer the world, so it was a plan of last resort.

But the Dragon Conqueror needn't have worried since he hadn't had that kind of problem from Hiccup, and the young man had done a great deal to prove himself worthy of their trust even if he didn't deserve it. As the months had passed the Dragon Conqueror's fears about Hiccup subsided although he had the boy watched at all times, and in any case, his attention was diverted to other matters, like the construction of warships, war machines, increasing the stock of gunpowder, and keeping watch on the growing army he had under his control while he listened to his spies and prepared his longterm plans, making adjustments every so often, so he didn't spend much of his time with Hiccup.

And now this.

The Warlord quickly came to a decision. "I am putting you in command of my military garrison. Your first task is to despatch scouting parties - not big ones, no more than three men or so each - to try to find out where the dragons have gone. Once you have done that, I want you to put every soldier, every cannon on full alert."

The newly-promoted general caught on quickly. "You believe the dragons will attack?"

"It wouldn't surprise me. After what they've done in the arena, the next logical step for them is to destroy this city, destroy everything," the warlord said, convincing himself everything he was saying was the truth.

XXX

The Dragon Conqueror woke up and looked around himself jerkily, before he closed his eyes and sighed in relief. "It was only a dream," he murmured. "It was only a dream…"

It had been a very vivid one, he remembered. He had been watching his city burning with dragons swarming over the screaming populace, breathing fire over the city, setting it alight and killing his people while his army struggled to cope with the attack. And all that time he watched a dragon flying overhead, a dragon with a very distinctive human shape on it's back.

"I hope it was about me!"

The warlord jumped, only to find the cold, sharp edge of a sword pressed against his neck. The warlord tensed, knowing that if he made just one wrong move there would be nothing that would stop his intruder from slashing his throat. "Who are you?" he asked, cursing that he had jumped at the first sound that had come from the man's mouth.

The figure approached and in the dim lighting of the bed-chamber, the warlord saw that it was Hiccup himself. He had to stop himself shivering as the dim lighting of the bed-chamber made his face with the single eye appear more sinister.

"How did you get in here?" the warlord hated the fearful quivering coming from his voice, but he couldn't help himself. He wondered if Hiccup had somehow managed to kill his guards and his aides, but he doubted that was the case given what he thought he knew about the young dragon pirate's personality. Hiccup was smarter than that, he knew if came in boldly then the guards would have woken him (the warlord) long ago.

No, they had to be alive.

Hiccup chuckled in amusement. "Believe me, it was far from easy," his voice hardened. "I've waited a long time for a moment like this."

The warlord looked at the dragon pirate, terrified out of his wits. "You're here to kill me?" he gasped.

"Yes," Hiccup's response was simple.

The Dragon Conqueror felt numb with terror. Out of reflex he opened his mouth, to call for help, but Hiccup saw the action and recognised it for what it was, and he pressed the cold razor-edged blade to his throat. The warlord closed his mouth slowly, in full view of Hiccup so the pirate wasn't alarmed, although a part of him wondered why he was bothering.

Hiccup was going to kill him anyway, so why not get it over with? The thought was chilling, but it was mostly out of curiosity the Dragon Conqueror decided to keep his mouth shut from raising the alarm, although he wondered how long it would take before somebody did come in; while his servants kept their distance from him when he was asleep or eating, his guards could still hear something from outside even if Hiccup was keeping his voice low.

Maybe…

A thought had just occurred to him. If he could keep Hiccup talking for a while.

"I thought you were going to burn the city to the ground," the conqueror said conversationally, trying to appear calm and controlled even with the sword held at his throat. "Surely that would be easier than sneaking about in the middle of the night?"

"Mmm, yeah, I mean I had thought of burning the city to the ground," Hiccup replied, pressing the sword slightly deeper into the Conqueror's neck to remind the warlord who was in control here. "In fact, I've been looking forward to it for a while, but after a bit of time, I decided I wasn't going to bother. I gave it some thought, and I realised if I burnt the city to a smoky ruin, I would be giving somebody else the idea of using dragons for their own ends. See, I remembered the story you told me when I saw how happy the dragons were they were free again. At the time I was going to attack but when I saw how happy they were, I realised I didn't want to do that; I've seen so many cases of people losing their minds to the hatred of dragons, and I didn't want to see it happen again. Some of them hated the dragons, and yet at the same time they could see the benefits of having an army of them at their command."

"So you decided to deal with me personally while making sure you didn't accidentally inspire someone else to accomplish what I have wanted for my entire life? Interesting," the Conqueror commented, unable to help but admire the logic by which Hiccup had made his decision even if he currently despised Hiccup, "but you do realise someone else will attempt to do what I have?'

"Of course."

"And you won't always be around to prevent it from happening," the Dragon Conqueror smirked suddenly, delighting in a little victory. He knew Hiccup was a nomad, always on the move. He couldn't be everywhere at once.

Unfortunately, he had been too clever for his own good because Hiccup drove the blade deeper into his neck.

"Don't be too clever. It doesn't suit you." Suddenly Hiccup was extremely angry. "Months and months I have had to put up with you, your orders. I may not be around forever, but I will always be on hand to stop the likes of you from using dragons for your own ends."

"How are you any different from me and others like me, Hiccup?" the Dragon Conqueror asked sharply, wondering why nobody had come into his chambers yet, and for one hideous second he wondered if Hiccup had actually killed his guards outside, but with the sword pressed against his face there was no way he could find out for certain.

"What do you mean?" Real curiosity entered Hiccup's face as he posed the question.

"You ride a dragon, you use it to plunder ships, burn towns and cities to get what you want-," the Conqueror let out a pained gasp as the edge of the sword pressed itself into his neck, but as he looked into Hiccup's eye, he realised he might have gone too far this time.

"There's a big difference between us; I don't enslave dragons to turn them into unthinking soldiers, I just plunder ships and towns to get what I need," Hiccup argued.

"No," the Conqueror said bravely, deciding that if he was going to die now he may as well die after planting seeds of conflict in Hiccup's soul. "You claim the dragons are free beings, and yet you use one for your own ends. You're no different from -!"

Hiccup, having had enough, slashed the Conqueror's throat before he could complete his sentence. The Dragon Conqueror, the warlord who had dreamt of conquering the entire world using enslaved dragons, let out a slow gurgle as he fell to the ground with a look of shock on his face at how quickly he had been killed.

XXX

Why was it no matter where he went into the world, he would always encounter people like the Dragon Conqueror, Drago, and Alvin and they would always claim he was no better than they were?

How many times over the last few years of his life had he been forced to run into that question? Hiccup must have had it thrown into his face a dozen times over and over again, especially when he first learnt of Drago's existence and how the chief of that tribe in the archipelago had compared him to the madman.

Okay, yeah; he plundered cities, towns, and ships, but while he could always claim his operation was on a much smaller level compared to the likes of the three maniacs, looking down at the corpse on the ground reminded Hiccup of just how easy it was for people to assume the line was blurred.

A lot of it was his own fault, of course, especially after this mess.

Hiccup knew he could have easily have done all this a long time ago, back when he had made the Conqueror believe he was on his side. But no, he had needed to be clever, and the result was six dragons had been killed simply because the Chinese people couldn't control their own prejudices and had attacked the dragons in the enclosure. Hiccup had seen it happen before, on Berk (granted, he had needed to be a good distance away from the Kill Ring's dome to keep Gobber and Stoick happy), he had seen the kids of all ages throwing things down at the dragons, encouraged and egged on by their peers and parents.

Hiccup shook his head, deciding not to think or care about the past.

It had no place in the here and the now.

Right now he was just thankful he had taken a good long look at the dragons after he had freed them from their prison, seeing how happy they were now they were free, and he had realised that he didn't want to risk their lives against an entire city. Hiccup had given the whole matter a great deal of thought before he had made his final decision, and he realised he couldn't attack and burn the warlord's city to the ground; not only was the warlord the only driving force behind the dragon army but with the General dead the warlord was now the only threat.

In any case, what if he had attacked the city and returned years later after he'd found Toothless, and discovered someone had risen to become the Drago of this land, and found a way of enslaving which the warlord hadn't because he'd simply not bothered to even look?

But the deciding factor had been seeing the sheer joy the dragon's had all shared at being free, and Hiccup had realised with sinking horror that in coming up with the plan to destroy the city in the first place, he was becoming no better than Drago and the others.

Piracy was one thing, destruction on that scale was another.

But most of all, Hiccup didn't want to ruin the lives of Thor alone knew how many children, twisting their lives in an attack because he was angry with the treatment himself and the dragons had endure, and risking the transformation of one into a monster who used dragons for their own ends. On a lesser note, he didn't want to make the Chinese hatred towards dragons worse.

So, he had just decided to kill the Dragon Conqueror instead, and live in hope the dream of conquering the world with dragons died a little bit further.

Hiccup sighed and he turned around and walked to the window where he found the dragon he had used to fly him here. Hiccup smiled affectionately at the dragon, patting him gently on the snout.

"Come on," he whispered while he slung his leg over to sit on the dragon's back. "Time to get back to the others."

The dragon purred gently, and once he was sitting comfortably they took off. Hiccup smiled in delight as the breeze whipped through his hair, and he closed his remaining eye in pleasure.

Oh, he had missed this, the night flights…. He remembered all the times he had gone out and enjoyed the nighttime flights with Toothless when the pair of them had still been in hiding on Berk before everyone had gone wrong so fast. He quickly closed those thoughts off from his mind, trying to put his fears for Toothless' wellbeing out of his mind.

But it was hard.

Hiccup had no idea what had happened to the Night Fury, and while he knew Toothless could look after himself, that artificial tail-fin he'd made to replace the one he (Hiccup) had ripped off during that fateful dragon raid on Berk before his ex-father had gone on that hunt for the nest could only last forever, and Hiccup had no idea what could have happened to it. Without a tail fin, Toothless would be vulnerable and helpless.

Hiccup closed his eyes, praying to Thor and Odin to help him exorcise the memory of their last meeting and the never-ending fear he had had since. But as he flew on the dragon's back over the city, Hiccup knew he was closing a chapter in his life, but truthfully he didn't care.

As of right now he and the dragons had a lot to do; they were leaving in the morning, but Hiccup had told them they were free to do as they pleased. The good news was, he knew precisely where he had last seen Toothless, and tomorrow he would begin the long trek to reunite with his friend.


	9. Chapter 9

I don't own How to Train your Dragon. I just make do with fanfiction.

I am so sorry about the long wait for this latest chapter, but I have been busy with writing my own novel and writing other stories. Thanks for being so patient. I hope you are all okay.

Enjoy.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

After he had finished dealing with the Dragon Conquering warlord, Hiccup had immediately taken the dragons and he'd flown them away, putting as much distance between them and the Conqueror's city. As he sat on the back of one of the Burning Flames, enjoying the feel of the chill air on his face indicative of a dragon flying at top speed which he had missed for a what seemed like a decade, Hiccup wondered what was going to happen with that city now their warlord was gone, but he didn't have time to do that now. He had just escaped from the shackles chaining him to the service of the Dragon Conqueror, and he currently had depleted resources right now to really focus on the matter.

He would probably check later when he had adjusted to his newfound freedom, and hopefully, once he had found Toothless, how the city was doing, and if the next ruler had the same ambitions as the Dragon Conqueror. He doubted he would need to worry; the Dragon Conqueror's ambitions for the dragons had been radical, even by the standards of many of his peers. The only reason the General had given his support in the first place was that the soldier had seen the military potential of using the dragons as mobile, living war machines while at the same time he had harboured his own ambitions to build his own militaristic vision for the future with dragons as a massive army, so he had thrown in his support.

Under the General, many of the soldiers and low-level officers had not seemed to share their leader's enthusiasm for the dragons. So even if one of the warlord's underlings took over in the hopes of continuing the warlord's work, he would need to find a soldier who had the same ambitions and it was hard to find one. Hiccup had personally known a few of the warlord's entourage, and while he didn't know if they had the charisma or influence their predecessor possessed, it was likely whoever did take control would just forget the whole thing and move on.

In any case, it had taken months and months for the city to manage to trap, contain and even transport the number of dragons Hiccup had found in the compound. Hiccup had heard stories of how many people had died in the process, which only served to make the warlord's ideas and ambitions more and more unpopular, but the General's support and the warlords' many speeches of glory had prevented anyone from rebelling against the warlord. But it had been a close thing. If any of the warlord's aides were around, then they would likely know it was a bad idea in the long sad history of truly bad ideas.

Sure, he knew that there was no guarantee that it would happen of course, especially since Hiccup was sure there had been people living in the city who had liked the thought of being in command of a massive worldwide empire where they would have few losses in order to build it because they would have the ultimate weapon. However, he was positive they wouldn't go that far. Still, he would give the city a few years before he came back for a return visit to see what was happening before he knew for sure. In the meantime, he would enjoy being free although at the moment his mind was fixed on finding Toothless.

Thinking of the Night Fury made him sigh under his breath in thought. Hiccup knew the village name where he'd last seen Toothless and he had every intention of heading there as soon as he could, without fail, but the problem was he had no idea where it was otherwise he would be heading there right now. He looked down, but he couldn't see anything through the cloud cover. He had told the dragons to fly to a place where they could be safe and rest for the night before the start of the morning.

By safe, he had meant somewhere high up where humans couldn't bother them, a place where they could rest while some found food for the entire group. The dragons with their usual intelligence had known what was being asked of them, and they hadn't disappointed him. They had travelled to a mountain range with sheer walls that were virtually impossible for ordinary people to climb. Hiccup smirked as a thought crossed his mind that while so many people in this country had a thing for wanting dragons dead, they would have to find them first.

When he became aware of the mountains, Hiccup realised he could hear the rushing sound of a waterfall. From the sounds of it, the fall was quite a large one.

As the dragons landed on the top of the mountain on an overhanging rock which overlooked the waterfall, Hiccup shivered a bit. It was actually quite cold, but he ignored it; he had gone through winters on Berk, where he had inevitably been left with fever which had incapacitated him for weeks that were much colder than this. It was quite dark, but some of the dragons opened their mouths and lit up a small mixture of the gasses and chemicals they used for their fires.

The light let him look around the little plateau where the first thing which caught his eye was another waterfall, but he hadn't been able to hear it over the sound of the rushing water from the original one he had heard. This one was just as enormous as the original as the water crashed over it, creating fine white foamy water. Hiccup and the dragons were currently standing on top of what was essentially a large rocky bridge where the water would flow underneath. He looked around and was relieved the bridge was large and wide enough for all of them to stand on safely without it wobbling. Once he had lost his interest in the fall, he walked to the edge and looked around with the water falling beneath his feet.

The dragons immediately started to lie on the rock to rest, while some of the others growled and cooed at each other in a celebration that they had gotten away from the place they'd been caged up and forced to perform. Some of the others, the stronger ones, rested for a few minutes before they immediately took flight again. Hiccup watched them go, knowing they were going to go for food. They'd be back soon.

With that in mind, he took the time to explore the top of the mountain. He didn't have anything better to do, and besides while he was tired he couldn't resist the urge to explore after being told for months he could not go here, or he could not go there by the General.

The mountain was quite high up, but he could see the darkness wreathed in clouds which misted around him, but in the distance, he could see signs of civilisation. Hiccup squinted his one good eye at it, but he eventually realised he couldn't tell if the lights were a village or a town. It was more likely to be one of those two, rather than another city. Still, in the morning it wouldn't make any difference.

Hiccup nodded to himself, noting absently the hunting party was returning to the mountain. He was surprised by how quick they were, it seemed like only seconds since they had left to look for food, but he guessed they had found somewhere pretty nearby that had a wide variety of food they'd like to eat, but he didn't give it much thought, his mind was fixed on his plans for the next day. He would visit the place tomorrow morning, and he would find out which direction the fishing village where he had lost sight of Toothless. Hopefully, in two days, he would meet with Toothless again as long as nothing else happened.

While he was thinking about this fate apparently had other ideas, one of the younger dragons bounded enthusiastically up behind Hiccup's back. One of the older dragons lifted its head while satisfying its hunger for fresh food after months of being served poor quality foods despite Hiccup's best efforts. The older dragon quickly roared a warning. Hiccup jumped in surprise at the unexpected cry, but the moment he turned to see what was going on, it was already too late.

Hiccup screamed in surprise as the dragon cannoned into his chest with enough force to demolish a wall, and he went over the edge of the bridge and tumbled down where he plunged into the streaming water. Hiccup would never be too sure of how much time had passed at the moment when his head was completely submerged; in fact, when he looked back on the accident, he would realise time had no meaning since everything had happened so fast it was hard to concentrate. All he would remember was his mouth was open, taking in a massive amount of the water melted from the ice on top of the mountain, filling his lungs with icy cold water. Instantly he thrashed around desperately, trying to claw his way through the wall of flowing water to find a way to breathe….

Only there was some kind of crash and he sensed there was a lot more water around him than there had been before, and then Hiccup felt himself being washed away down a different direction, and he couldn't see anything at all. The lack of air, the water in his body, the crash where he had sensed more water surrounding him, especially following the crash where the inky blackness induced by the night which had stopped him getting an idea of how deep the water itself was, was very disorientating on Hiccup's mind, and now he was being washed away by the rapids of the river he was now in, and he was going really fast, but his mind was so fogged he barely noticed just how fast he was travelling.

Suddenly he felt as if he was being swallowed up by the water like there was a giant mouth beneath him. Hiccup almost fell for it, but he quickly realised he was drowning. With the last of his strength, he pushed himself and he managed to break the surface. The moment he registered the fresh air of the surface, Hiccup coughed and gulped in air.

Unfortunately, it didn't last long before the force of the rapids which were pulling him along pulled his head under the water again and the little air he had in his lungs seemed to vanish as the current washed him downriver so fast he was only just aware of it. The brief exposure to the surface had given him the strength he had needed to try to return to the surface again, only he was pulled under again and he managed to suck up only a meagre amount of air into his lungs before he was dragged under again where he was sucked back into the depths of the river. Hiccup wondered to himself as he once more felt the inky darkness close in around him if Loki himself was behind this. It would certainly be his style and the dragon rider could even feel the god of mischief's love of the sense of irony in the situation; not only had Hiccup loved and trained dragons for years, but he had also been knocked over the edge of a waterfall by one, and was now drowning. How could Loki possibly pass up the opportunity to make things more interesting?

Hiccup refused to let himself drown like this, so he swam upwards as hard as he could until he felt as if his lungs had been transformed into a pair of blacksmith bellows and his legs and arms felt as unbendable as bars of iron before he managed to lift his head above the rushing surface before he was pulled under again. All this went on and on before, rising to the surface once more, Hiccup coughed and spluttered, and then he realised that the water was losing speed. With a weary sigh of relief, he tried to swim against the minuscule current, aiming for whatever bank he could find.

He didn't care which.

He swam as hard as he could, forcing himself to keep his legs kicking while at the same time making sure he had enough air passing into his lungs. His fingers felt massive clumps of grass, and he forced his hands to take a grip of them and pull himself over the grass. He gasped and panted while he heaved himself out of the water, forcing his hands to let go of the clumps he was clinging to for dear life only to reach further up and he grabbed hold of more grass. He was desperate to heave himself out of the water, and as he pulled on the clumps of grass in front of him, changing over every few seconds he felt his legs slowly be pulled out of the water until he was out.

As soon as he felt his body was once more on dry land, Hiccup collapsed onto the ground. He was completely exhausted; when the dragon had charged into his chest and he'd gone over the edge, his lungs had been squeezed of air, and the ride down the river rapids hadn't helped. His body felt sore and his throat felt like someone had cut it open and left it to dry out in the sun. Hiccup closed his eyes and within minutes he was asleep.


	10. Chapter 10

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon.

Please let me know what you think.

Note - I am sorry it's taken a while to get back to this story, but I hope you enjoy this and future uploads. Enjoy.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

The first thing he felt was pure exhaustion.

As he woke up, momentarily wondering why one of his eyes was covered before he remembered that it had been cut out, and looked around, blinking at the unfamiliar room which was so dark and shadowy it was virtually impossible for him to see the finer details of anyway, so there was no real reason for him to bother anyway, he tried to remember what had brought him here in the first place…._ Beard of Thor; he was just so tired, and sore! _

He realised there was a strong, sharp pain in his chest, and he winced with every move he took.

And then he remembered; he remembered the dragon accidentally knocking him in his chest, sending them over that waterfall and then down the rapids, where he had almost drowned.

Hiccup closed his one good eye, and he rubbed his forehead. He had to admit he had encountered his own fair share of exuberant dragons, Toothless among them, but he had never once been literally fallen for one, either. But last night - actually, he wondered how long he had been here, but because there was nothing in here as far as he could tell that could give him an idea how just how much time had passed, he would go with the belief he had been here for a night or so - there had been moments, terrifying ones at that, where he would drown.

Looking up, Hiccup sat up and began performing a few yoga moves he had picked up on his travels to get some life into his tired limbs. All that time he tried to focus on what was around him, but the trouble was there was little to no ambient light in the room he was in. After he was finished with the basic yoga exercises, Hiccup slowly stood up and he took a look around while he inwardly hoped he had not been taken prisoner again; it had been bad enough the last time, when that bastard warlord had wanted him to give up his dragon training secrets.

But in this case, Hiccup just hoped he hadn't landed himself in yet another mess that would take forever to just get himself out of. As he stood up, he realised that he was still wearing his trousers. His chest was exposed, but as he touched himself he realised there was a bandage wrapped around it.

_At least I've found out what caused the pain, _he thought to himself with an idle grimace while he tried to remember how he had gotten the injury in the first place, but he quickly realised it was futile; he had likely gotten it at some point when he had gone over the edge of the mountain and down the waterfall, but as he thought back on it while he tried to rack his brains, he remembered it all being a rush where he had been struggling to breathe. Even now he couldn't remember the finer details of when he went under; he just remembered the pitch darkness and cold, and a feeling of travelling very very fast, beyond his control, and he recalled the pain in his lungs without having any air to breathe.

Hiccup shook his head, deciding it was better if he didn't dwell on that, and he also decided to just relegate the mystery of how his chest had gotten injured in the first place to the back of his mind, to the place where he woke up with no memory of how things happened and it was better off left unsolved. In any case, it didn't really matter. What did matter right now was finding out where he was, and just how much further he was from the village where he had last seen Toothless, and form a plan to deal with it all so he could find the Night Fury.

Remembering some lessons a half-blind hunter had taught him a few years ago, Hiccup went very still and he took a number of deep, regular breaths to better control his breathing, but he groaned and winced when he felt the pain in his chest. But he quickly managed to find it within himself to better control and contain the pain within his chest with some effort, but once he could control his breathing he closed his remaining eye and listened while he tried to breathe in and out through his nose.

Once he was finished, Hiccup listened without the darkness distracting him. Now he was paying attention, he could definitely hear the sound of birds chirping, that meant it was daylight.

Hiccup kept listening, hoping to hear other sounds rather than just the birds and he was rewarded when he heard the distant sounds of voices. He leaned forward to be better heard, but they were just too far for him to make out. He reopened his eye and he began the slow task of gently patting the walls of the room or 'cell' he was trapped in. The problem was the room he was in was quite dark, so his natural night-vision was hampered, and he didn't know if there were things like a table in the way.

He stumbled over a small object made from wood which came up to his waist, and he felt it, sensing it to be a table, but he didn't know for sure but he quickly dismissed it, and he resumed his search. He searched one wall, and then another. But he found nothing. And then he found it, what felt like a door. Hiccup gently traced it, feeling the hinges and the handle. He tested it, but it was locked. Hiccup closed his eye, and he pushed against it to see if it was strong enough to withstand his strength.

After a few minutes, he gave up. Frustrated, Hiccup went around the rest of the room to find if there was another way out of here. He began resuming his search around the room. It wasn't until he had walked around the room, to the opposite wall to the one where the door was, he discovered large, thick and heavy feeling drapes. As with before when he had been examining the door, Hiccup examined these drapes, noting their heaviness with some surprise. When he found the base of them, he discovered they touched the floor. Slowly he lifted them up, wondering if they were bolted down to the floor.

He gathered the heavy drapes up, feeling their trough weave and he threw the bottom of the drapes over his shoulders and he stood up. The sudden bright light almost blinded him, and he staggered back from the force of the glare while he clamped his eye shut. He blinked a few times to let his eye adapt to the light while it flooded his room- Hiccup groaned as he instantly shook his head to get the word flood out of his mind.

After his experiences with being knocked off that cliff and down that waterfall into the river, Hiccup wanted to stay as far from waterfalls and anywhere there were deep pools of water where he'd drown in if he fell in.

Once his eyes had managed to adapt to the glare, Hiccup looked around the room he was in. It was roughly the same size as the room he'd had on Berk in Stoick's house. It was actually quite simple - there was a bed with a trunk at the foot, a chair and just a door, and aside from those features the room was extremely utilitarian. At the same time, Hiccup could see from the simple, almost severe nature of the room, it was extremely neat as if in wait for a new occupant. Hiccup looked out of the window to see if he was too high up to jump out of it. He looked around for anything small, and he opened the trunk but all he found inside were a few blankets. Also in the box was a neatly folded pile of orange cloth. Hiccup frowned and he gently lifted the pile out of the box.

It was a set of robes, and as he unfolded them he gradually recognised them as a set of robes worn by the monks. Underneath the set of unfolded robes he was holding in his hand was what looked like another set of robes. Hiccup guessed they were meant for newcomers, new members of the order at the monastery. Hiccup smiled in relief, pleased with the revelation; he had visited several Buddhist monasteries since he had arrived in this part of the world.

While he had grown up with the Norse religion, Hiccup had been fascinated by what he had encountered in different parts of the world, from the Hindu pantheon to what he had found in Greece. In comparison with Buddhism, Hiccup had been moved by the simplicity and the spiritual contemplation found in monasteries such as this one. Hiccup rubbed his face thoughtfully, thinking of the possibilities. The monks would help him find out where he was, and how far he was away from the village he had last seen Toothless. With luck, they might be able to arrange some kind of transport and a map to help him get there.

There was a knock on the door. Hiccup turned around. "It's alright, I'm awake," he called.

The door opened. Two monks came inside. One of them was carrying a tray with a bronze coloured tureen that was steaming. Hiccup smiled as he studied them before he brought up his hands and pressed his palms together, and he executed a perfect bow.

"Thank you for saving my life and bringing me here," he said.

The two monks were surprised by the unexpected politeness, but the one whose hands were free returned the move. "We bid you welcome," he said.

The monk carrying the tray walked over with the tray and placed it delicately on the bed so as not to spill the contents. "Are you feeling better?" He asked.

"Much, thank you," Hiccup smiled. "How long have I been here?"

"Two days."

Hiccup gaped. He had known he had been here for some time after being knocked out by going over the waterfall and being washed downriver, but he hadn't expected it to be so long. "Two days?" He repeated before he shook his head. "Thank you for telling me."

"You take this news very well."

Hiccup shrugged. "I've been through a dozen or so scrapes," he replied, hoping the monks did not ask for details about his past since he didn't know for sure how they'd react if they knew about his dragon-riding past. Over the years since his self imposed (more or less) exile from Berk and the other Viking tribes, Hiccup had developed a policy of not telling anyone about dragons until after he had determined if the peoples he had met were as dangerous towards them as Vikings were. But once he had left, he had found it better to not say a word. "The best thing to do is just to get on with your life."

"A wise approach," the first monk commented. "It is better to be more accepting of everything around you, rather than dwell on what could have been."

Hiccup nodded, and he was about to say more, and then he recalled something of importance in the bedroom. The drapes. Why they were so large and so heavy, not to mention so thick it was virtually impossible to tell if it was night or day outside. But before he could open his mouth, he heard something familiar. The sound of a dragon roar.

But it sounded very close. Really close.

He looked at the monks. "It sounds as though you have dragons nearby," he commented.

The second monk smiled. "Yes, they land really close to the monastery. There's a large pond they drink from before they fly off.'

"Oh, interesting," Hiccup tried to say offhandedly, wondering if he could tame one of the dragons and fly out of here after he had gotten an idea of where he was in relation to the village where he'd last seen Toothless.

But then he saw something in the faces of the two monks. They appeared to be nervous about something.


	11. Chapter 11

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon. I just own this story.

Please let me know what you think.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

While the monks had been friendly enough since he had woken up, Hiccup couldn't shake off the feeling they were hiding something. And as he spent the first few days at the monastery, that feeling just grew. Now, and as he looked out of the window as the sun was just beginning to rise to signify a brand new day, the sounds of the monks chanting in the air, the music of their chanting voices joining with the sounds of nature outside the monastery from the gentle breeze and the song of birdsong, he wondered what they were hiding and why they always gave him the same reply, which was a giveaway something big was happening here. He had been at the monastery for four days now, resting and eating, while they tended to him while her regathered his strength.

And all that time, so far, he had been hearing the nearby sounds of dragons.

The sounds were worrying Hiccup. As a boy who'd grown up in a Viking village on the other side of the world, a living witness to the Viking-Dragon war in China, Hiccup had heard many sounds coming from dragons, and as he had begun seeing their other side, not the biased crap dredged up by older Vikings who had partially made out their views about dragons by what they had wanted to see but also what they believed whenever they had come face to face with one of the Queen's thralls, lending credence to the view the dragons were nothing more than evil demons, and being locked in a seemingly endless stalemate for three hundred years without the Vikings even knowing it.

Hiccup frowned in thought as he looked out of the window, trying to listen in on the sounds nearby. He could hear the sounds of birds and the gentle whistling of the breeze which gently waved warm air into his face. But he couldn't hear any dragons, and it gave him the time he needed to think about the sounds he had been hearing recently for the past four days since he had woken up in this room.

He had heard the sounds of crooning, which meant there were dragon parents caring for their younglings and the sounds of purring which meant they were happy and among friends. Occasionally he had heard the squawks from them, similar to the cry of a rooster first thing in the morning. But at the same time, he was surprised when he heard roars of pain.

But he never saw any sign of a dragon.

Not once did he see any sign of a silhouette in the air. Not once did he hear the beating of dragon wings in the air, the triumphant hunting calls all predatory dragons emitted whenever they spotted their prey and dive-bombed them. It was like somebody was orchestrating the sounds of the dragons, although he knew that wasn't possible for long periods with the human larynx. It was as if the monks and the other senior members of the monastery were pretending there were no sounds of roars, that there were no croons or purrs.

And all the time he had the impression the monks knew precisely what was going on. They denied it, of course; ever since he had commented on the sound shortly after he had woken up from going over that waterfall, Hiccup had sensed the monks becoming more and more reserved and cautious around him as if they knew he was onto them and they were trying to put him off the scent. Hiccup was amused by their efforts, though they did not work. Still, it wasn't their fault they weren't trained in that field any more than he was despite the practice he'd gained over the years.

But he didn't pay any attention to that. While the monastery and what was going on was a mystery in itself, Hiccup had other more important things on his mind. The monks, despite making sure he was well fed albeit uninformed about what was going on, had given him access to the maps of the local coastline so he could get some idea of where he was, and they had also helped him find the small fishing village where he had last seen Toothless, and he had been looking for a way he could return to the village in the shortest possible time so he could find out if the Night Fury had left any trace of his presence.

He hoped he could speak to the abbot of the village, hoping the leader of the monastery would be able to help him return to the village, and he had been told by the monks he could see and speak to the abbot when he was feeling much better after being found. Well, today was that day and he hoped the answer to finding a way back to Toothless was a clear, resounding yes.

But at the same time, Hiccup hoped to stay here for a few days and learn more about the monastery and the monks who resided inside its walls. While he had visited many Buddhist temples and monasteries in his time in China, much as he had witnessed Hindu and Sikh ceremonies in India, Hiccup had discovered that while the countries he had travelled to had regions which followed all of the traditions of those religions, they all had traditions of their own.

It was always fascinating for Hiccup to visit them and carefully learn about those traditions while keeping a humble and respectful distance so he didn't offend anyone; he had discovered many people were incredibly touchy about defending their cultures and they didn't like it when outsiders criticised their ways of life, but he couldn't blame them. How many times had he heard of outsiders trying to do the same to Viking religion and culture over the centuries? Too many times. It was partially due to the Viking's prowess in battle, their will and their knowledge of their survival had fought those attempts off, but Hiccup would learn from his travels to keep his mouth shut on his own opinions.

But truthfully, he had discovered as long as you didn't say anything about other cultures, they were friendly enough. Although truthfully it might have been because of their fear of Toothless, but still.

Hiccup smiled as he thought about the days when he had spent meeting Hindu and Sikh priests, chatting and debating with them on nature and spirituality; granted, while many of them had knowledge of philosophies far beyond anything Hiccup had ever imagined as a Viking, he had still been fascinated by the talks. It was the same when he had met Buddhists for the first time in his life, and he had been amazed and drawn to the differences of their beliefs, even though they both existed in India, and followed several practices, such as meditation, but the Hindus offered offerings in their temples.

But while Hiccup was _uncertain _about the Buddhist belief the world was created by a self-conscious, personal God, as opposed to the many Gods, believed in by Hinduism and Viking beliefs, he was drawn to the Buddhists desire for enlightenment. It was always a treat to visit the numerous monasteries which practiced it because he would have the opportunity to speak to the monks and the abbots; one of the best things about people was they had their own ideas and beliefs, and it was always fun to debate with somebody about something he had discussed already, and he had gotten a different opinion.

A roar broke him out of his thoughts and he jumped, suddenly alert. His keen eye scanned the serene and beautifully calm monastery grounds, bordered with the thick walls which surrounded them, only to be guarded by the natural wall of trees. It was a dragon, Hiccup was sure of it. He leaned in closer, leaning against the windowsill so he could see any details and listen in on the sounds out there.

The roar had silenced the birds in the trees nearby, but despite that and standing as still as he could, Hiccup just couldn't hear anything no matter how hard he could, and he was straining his ears just to listen.

But as he focused on listening outside the monastery itself, Hiccup became aware the sounds of chanting seemed to have ended as well. But then the sounds of chanting began again - it seemed the monks had dropped their facade for a moment, either because they had been startled by the sounds of the roars at this time of the morning, or because those particular monks just weren't as good at ignoring the sounds like other monks. He had noticed that about the monastery. Whenever the dragons nearby made a sound - a roar, a croon, a purr, or a snort - and there were monks chanting, then the monks would continue their chanting as if nothing had happened, so the ones who had just stopped had only given themselves away and somebody had probably reminded them there was a guest in the monastery so they would keep up their act. At that moment the door opened, and two monks stepped into the room. Outwardly they were the very picture of serenity, but their manner made them skittish.

"The abbot will see you now," one of them said, his voice trying to be as low and serene as with all monks, however, it seemed to be shaking with urgency and agitation.

"Please, come with us," the second monk spoke in the same serene manner but was much better at being deceptive than his friend. Hiccup nodded silently and followed them out of the room, trying to not show any sign he was onto them while he watched them as he went with them out of the room to see the abbot. In the past Hiccup would have been more curious, asking question after question, but over the years he had learnt people could be deceptive and they were good at telling lie after lie until he was left with a web of intrigue.

In any case, the monks had been telling him over and over again he was mistaken about the sounds of the dragons nearby, and they weren't going to change now. Hiccup sighed and followed them through the passageways of the monastery, smelling the sweet incense as he walked through them, hearing the sounds of the chanting monks. Once or twice, Hiccup and the two monks escorting him came across a monk or two. Hiccup always bowed in the traditional manner and gave a polite, gap-toothed smile at them.

The monks bowed back, but otherwise, they were silent. Hiccup didn't say a word, used to this treatment.

Finally, the two monks escorting him to the abbot brought him to a pair of large doors, one of them knocked on the door.

"Come in, please," a high aged but still strong and vigorous voice called.

Silently the monks opened the doors and escorted Hiccup inside. The room was quite large, with tall fluted ceilings supported by red columns. Dominating the entire room was a large statue of the Buddha sitting in that familiar cross-legged pose with a serene expression on his face. Standing in front of the Buddha statue was a tall old man with a wrinkled face wearing long white robes which were in the same style as the robes of the other monks, but his eyes burned with vigour and wisdom, but there was something else there Hiccup recognised from staring at Spitelout often enough when he had looked the arrogant Viking in the eye.

Cunning.

And at first, Hiccup wondered if he was staring at an older, smaller version of his former uncle from Berk, but on closer inspection he realised there was a calm serenity in the abbot's face that somehow cooled the cunning in his eyes, making Hiccup wonder for himself how the abbot used his cunning and what form it took while at the same acknowledging the abbot as someone he didn't want to cross.

Hiccup pressed both his hands together and executed a perfect bow. "Thank you for seeing me, sir," he said. "I know you are busy-."

"It is you."

Hiccup looked up in surprise. "I'm sorry?" As far as he knew he had never met this man before, and out of the corner of his single eye, he could see the reaction from the other monks; they were as baffled as he was himself.

The abbot smiled at Hiccup kindly, however, Hiccup knew due to experiences of politics he'd seen in various lands the smile might not be genuine. "Believe it or not, we have met before. However, we were never introduced by-," he said the name of the so-called Dragon Conqueror.

The moment he heard the name, Hiccup stiffened. If this man was one of the warlord's agents… but that made no sense, he had never gotten the impression the warlord was a religious type, so what was going on?

The abbot seemed to take his confusion and his sudden paranoia as amusing even though Hiccup found nothing amusing about this. "I have known about you for a long time, now," the old man said conversationally, still smiling that same smile. "I have been hearing rumours of a dragon rider in China for months now, a rider with one eye and who rode a black dragon. When I learnt of your presence in -," he uttered the name of the village Hiccup and Toothless had last seen each other, "I had to visit it to see for myself if there really was a dragon rider, but you were elusive, and yet I did see a black dragon once I was patient."

Hiccup stiffened at the mention of Toothless, but he looked at the abbot contemplatively, wondering if he was telling the truth. He wondered if the abbot was lying, but how would he know anything about the Warlord? Or what about Toothless?

The real kicker, however, was the mention of the village Hiccup had last seen Toothless in, and the abbots' description of his flights there. The villagers had been wary of him, given he was not one of their people, but they'd been even warier of dragons. As a result, he'd had to take Toothless out on flights before sunrise and late in the evening. The best thing, however, had been the fact the cave Toothless was hiding in was accessible by boat which would take him to a cave entrance further along the coast and by foot, he had always left in the boat, so if anyone thought of following him, he would have plenty of hiding places to wait in while they went past and he could slip back to Toothless.

He had learnt his lesson after being found out by Astrid, and he had no desire to repeat his mistakes, but now he was annoyed; why was it every time he took precautions with Toothless, someone always caught on and he was either captured or was forced to go on the run? First, Astrid, and then the Warlord, and now this.

His reaction was noticed instantly by the abbot. "Oh, you have nothing to worry about, my dear boy. I am not your enemy."

_Sorry, but I don't believe you, _Hiccup thought to himself, remembering how Alvin had tried to cultivate a friendship with him long ago, long before he had become a pirate. He remembered how the treacherous bastard had tried showering with gifts and words of flattery, but it hadn't worked because Hiccup had long since stopped being naive. In any case, did Alvin honestly think he had been living under a rock all his life?

The Outcasts had been notorious for years, using whatever means were at their disposal to destroy and enslave anyone stupid enough to cross them (Hiccup knew he himself fell into that category, given how he had been captured and caught unawares), but when Alvin had figured out he was wasting his time, Hiccup had been prepared for the pain, only he hadn't expected one of them to be overzealous enough to rip out one of his eyes.

He had no desire for something similar to happen here, either. Hiccup knew from his cross-country travels over China, many monasteries practiced Kung-Fu, a martial art which mimicked the natural movements of animals, and it had been practiced and refined until it had become as beautiful - and as deadly - like a dragon. Hiccup had picked up a few Kung-Fun moves during his visits, and he had even stayed at a monastery for five months so he could learn about it in detail, but he was far from being an expert. These monks, if they practiced the art, would be, and the abbot in front of him would be a master practitioner. If Hiccup antagonised any of the monks, they would show him more pain than the crude methods Alvin and the other Outcasts had showered onto him.

Controlling himself with an effort so he didn't appear intimidated by the thought of what would happen if he did make the stupid mistake of angering or even annoying the monks, Hiccup tried to sound calm, "What do you want with me?"

The abbot gave him a frank look, which Hiccup was struck by since it was clearly arranged to make the monk appear to be a more grandfatherly figure, but Hiccup could tell this man was not one to take lightly. "We need your help."

"My help?" Now Hiccup was intrigued. "With what?"

The abbot seemed pleased by his interest. "It would be far simpler if I showed you. Please, come with me."

The other monks seemed surprised. "Are you sure you realise what you are doing-?"

"I know precisely what I am doing, now please follow," the abbot's voice dropped to a whisper as he turned to stare down the two monks who'd escorted Hiccup.

Hiccup turned and glanced at the two monks, seeing they were both bowing their heads in respect, although truthfully Hiccup had the feeling they were cowering, more than bowing. But the abbot didn't pay any attention to the monks, considering the matter closed while he walked towards the doors, and he gestured for the other three men in the room to follow him out. Hiccup silently did as he was told, and he followed the abbot out of the hall and through the maze of corridors with the other two monks following on.

The abbot's presence as he walked slowly, head raised in a dignified manner which was accustomed to command and being treated with great respect. Monks bowed in his presence and they stepped aside, no matter what - it didn't matter if they were carrying religious scrolls for study, food or water, or other supplies - they stepped to the side to let them all pass.

Granted, many of them were curious about the presence of Hiccup, a clear foreigner, in their midst, but the abbot's authority and standing in the monastery meant they left the building and moved onto the grounds without any argument. Hiccup held up a hand over his eye when the sunlight blazed overhead, and he had to hold that hand up as he followed the abbot, who wasn't even affected by the glare.

The abbot led them, or rather led Hiccup, around the monastery to a door in an overgrown part of the grounds close to the wall which the monks relied on for protection against bandits, but Hiccup was instantly intrigued. Why would the monks leave this part of the grounds overgrown? He looked around quickly, and he realised something.

This part of the monastery was a corner that was meant to be unnoticed, and the door was quite small. The monks were clearly going out of their way to make this part of the grounds as guarded as possible.

Hiccup's curiosity increased as he watched the abbot reach into his robes, producing a large tarnished key, and he slid it into the lock of the door and turned it before opening it wide. As the door creaked open, Hiccup jumped when he heard the sounds of dragons once more, only they were now really close. They were coming from the other side of the door.

The abbot gestured for him to approach while he stepped out of the way, and Hiccup walked forward slowly, wondering what he was going to see and what was going to be revealed. When he stood in the doorway, he gasped.

In front of him were a number of dragons with monks surrounding them.

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Until the next time, readers...


	12. Chapter 12

I own nothing.

Please let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy the cliffhanger.

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

"It's a hospital!" Hiccup's remaining eye was wide and bulging with surprise and wonder as he beheld the sight that was in front of him. But at the same time… hospital seemed like a rather inadequate word to describe what he was seeing, although he could see it. The door the abbot had just opened up seemed to have opened up a whole other world.

The door the monks had long since concealed from outsiders opened out into what looked like an enormous valley, surrounded by enormous trees but there were tall and massive walls Hiccup was able to see in the far distance, and he realised the hospital was only a small part of the place. A really small part. Hiccup saw he was looking out at a massive enclosure, where the walls were so sheer and so high, Hiccup knew it would be virtually impossible for anyone to climb up on the other side and peer over them. The monks were not stupid, they knew the attitudes of their own people towards dragons despite their hypocritical near worship of them. They knew if anyone managed to break in and see what was on the other side of the walls, then the monastery would be invaded and the dragons would be killed.

But then he realised something important, he saw something odd about the trees behind the walls. They seemed _taller than they should be. _Hiccup took a step forwards, and then he looked to the left and the right of the door, and he grinned in surprise.

This place was built in the same way as a massive Kill-Ring you'd find on one of the tribal islands in the Barbaric Archipelago. A massive pit covered and contained by a reinforced dome constructed of strong layers of metal bars set in fireproof stone, and spiked with jagged spears to stop the dragons from throwing themselves at the dome. However the pit had always been intriguing to Hiccup, and when he was a youngster apprenticed to Gobber back on Berk, Hiccup had learnt the Berkers of old had found an old network of caves and caverns just outside the village itself, set right into the cliff. Instead of building the Kill Ring somewhere else, some bright spark of the bunch had come up with a new idea.

Hiccup could just about hear it now. _"Hey' up, let's trap the dragons in the caves beneath the cliff."_

Only for someone to yell back. _"And how'd we fight 'em?"_

"_We could build a dome on top, dig a big pit so the beasts have a hard time getting out, and teach our kids how to fight the demons from there."_

"_Sounds like a good idea!"_

Truth to be told, Hiccup only had a small idea of how the first Kill Ring's had come about in the Archipelago, especially since he knew there was a lot more which had gone into their design and their construction, however that was how he suspected they had originated. He had always been fascinated by the engineering which had gone into building the Rings, and it was one of the few places on Berk he had gone out of his way not to cause any problems in, knowing if anything went even remotely wrong, Stoick would disown him. The irony was not lost on him now.

However, the Chinese had their own version of the Kill-Ring, although it might very well have been copied from the Vikings due to how similar they were. Granted, training people against dragons or training them to ride them, if you counted the bastard warlord's attempts to conquer the world, needed a lot of thinking. To train against dragons, you needed a wide-open space, fire and flameproof walls and some way to ensure the dragons stayed put.

But this was the first time he had ever seen a Kill-Ring style structure being put to benevolent use instead of just mindlessly building a Kill Ring, and simply following the steps the Vikings took in the pointless three century-long war. It was funny, he was thinking of this place as a Kill-Ring, and yet there was no dome overhead. The dragons were free to come and to go as they pleased. In fact, the entire place looked like it had been designed to be as comfortable for dragons to live in as they wished.

But at the same time… Hiccup had the feeling the walls were natural rather than artificial although there were a number of man-made additions to the place.

There was a large, artificial-looking waterfall with what appeared to be a large lake beneath it. Quite a few of the dragons were currently loitering around the lake now, and it looked like they were fishing, some of them were spearing their prey with their talons, others were standing over the lake water, waiting… and when they felt they'd found a catch, they snatched it out of the water.

Hiccup had seen dragons use those tactics before on many occasions, however, his attention was snagged by the sight of numerous dragon younglings, whizzing around, blowing out small jets of flame from their mouths which didn't do any damage although he knew if any of the more hardcore dragon killers he had known as a kid were here, they would be racing towards those dragons and would hack them to bits just for that.

Everywhere he looked there were dragons of all species common to China, and there were even a few species which Hiccup had yet to discover on his travels, and those that he had thought he had left behind a long time ago - he certainly felt a lot of nostalgia when he spotted a small group of Deadly Nadders playing among themselves, and what looked like a couple of Timberjacks with their massive, razor-edged wings although they looked comfortable just lazing around.

Hiccup wasn't surprised to see them, really; he had known there were dozens of dragons which had flown away from his part of the world, either because they had grown tired of being hunted and killed by Vikings over the years, or they had just wanted to see the world. They had nothing to stop them doing it, and in any case, many dragon species were littered with nomads. When he'd realised that, Hiccup had come to suspect the possibilities of there being Night Furies who'd left for the same reason.

Sure, just because he hadn't seen any outside the Archipelago yet didn't mean there weren't any out there, somewhere.

Anything was possible. In any case, seeing two species of dragon he was more familiar with gave him some hope. He wanted Toothless to have a chance to make some friends, maybe even have little dragons with.

But the reason why he had called this place a hospital was because there was a large barn (he didn't know what else he could call it, but he was sure the monks had their own name for the place), which had completely dominated his vision before he had looked around and beyond it, and he could see there were several monks moving slowly around some clearly wounded dragons; Hiccup stood up straight as he took note of one thin dragon of a breed he hadn't seen before yet, but was clearly one of the Asian castes of dragons, with its serpentine body, with what looked like a broken wing and what looked like razor netting wrapped around its chest. How it had survived Hiccup honestly didn't know. He had seen dragons torn to pieces by razor netting in the past, and those who'd managed to survive were lucky to still be able to move, never mind fly.

_Damn it all the way to Helheim! Why are we still hunting them? Is this insane need to murder dragons going to stay with us until Ragnorak? _

Sometimes Hiccup got that impression. He was just pleased some people were tending to the dragons with kindness and decency; he could see the serene acceptance on the faces of the monks, and it made him curious about what had made this particular monastery practice this in the first place.

"Impressive, isn't it?" He heard the Abbot say.

_Impressive? Beard of Thor, you can say that again, and more! _Hiccup thought to himself as he looked around the Ring, the enclosure….

"I-I don't have the words," Hiccup stuttered, and he was indeed lost for words.

He had always believed he was the only one in the world who cared about dragons, and believed they were loving creatures who just wanted to live their lives without fear of being hacked to pieces or impaled by spears while being hunted simply because of truly stupid fears; okay, he accepted he was being big-headed about those thoughts, but after a lifetime of watching dragons being cut to pieces, and how everyone whom he had met was so short-sighted and brainless, it was hardly a surprise. This was the first time he had met others who believed the same thing he did (a part of him wondered if all the monks were as accepting, but he decided to ignore that problem and let the monks themselves worry about it), but he had never imagined or suspected he would see something, anything, like this on such a large scale.

Hiccup turned to the Abbot. "I-I don't understand. Why are you caring for the dragons?"

The Abbot smiled benevolently. "I understand your confusion; you have seen the way my people and so many others have mistreated dragons for a very long time, it must be startling for you to see all of this," he gestured lightly around the peaceful scene around them, "The founder of this monastery was already on his way to becoming a monk. On one night, during his meditations, he came across a large dragon. At first, the monk, following the beliefs of his family, was startled and frightened, but he was unarmed so he wasn't a threat to them. Instead of running, the monk watched the dragon and realised it was actually a parent to a number of younglings. So he watched them. One of the younglings flew over to him, and the large dragon realised he was there.

"However the monk didn't run. Instead, he stroked the youngling's head, knowing he was risking his life, but while the younglings' parent was nervous, the monk realised all the stories about dragons being savage demons was wrong. He spent the next decade of his life trying to convince the local peoples of the provinces of the goodness of dragons. He failed, however, but he managed to prove it to several other monks. With their help and support, of other monks whom he introduced to dragons, the monk-led them to here where he founded our order, an order devoted to peace between dragon and humans," the abbot spread his hands around with an enigmatic and rather proud smile, "and they built the monastery after studying the local forest, and they chose to build it here because of the natural rock walls leading down."

"So this place really is natural?" Hiccup said.

"Definitely. The founders of the monastery wanted this place to be as remote as possible, and if they had ordered a pit for the dragons, the workmen might have asked too many questions. In any case, they wanted a place at ground level where dragons frequented. We merely had to be careful when we built the monastery, and even when we installed the wall close to where the dragons frequently landed and foraged, we had to be careful."

Hiccup shook his head. "It must have been hard for the workmen to build this place with dragons only a few yards away," he commented.

"It wasn't. You see the dragons were being tamed by the most experienced monks of the order. We recruited them when they were young. Young and impressionable, and then they were trained to see dragons the way our founder told us," the abbot explained.

Hiccup shook his head again at the scale of the monks' actions while he conjured a picture of his mind the construction of the monastery, and how the monks had done their best to keep the dragons tamed. But he still had some questions in his mind about that, how the monks had learnt how to tame dragons.

"How did you learn how to tame dragons?" He asked, wondering if they had used a method similar to how he had tamed Toothless.

The abbot smiled. "The monk who founded our order went back to the place where he met the dragons, and he found they were there. As he did, he learnt how to approach them; however, we do not ride the dragons as we respect their space and their privacy."

Hiccup listened closely, a part of him wondering if Toothless would have done the same if he'd still had the power of flight after they had first seen each other when Hiccup had leaned over the edge to peer closely into the cove Toothless had been trapped in. At the same time he was curious about what had made the dragon parent - he didn't know if it was the father, but it must have been the mother, given how dragon mothers were usually around the younglings… and then he realised; the dragons must have made a nest, and they had chosen that part of the woods as a temporary nest until the younglings were old enough to for longer flights, but it mystified him since the dragons he'd encountered preferred nesting on islands or mountain tops inaccessible to humans.

Hiccup guessed the dragons must have chosen that spot in the woods the abbot described because it was quiet, or because they didn't have any choice. He didn't know, however, he had a number of ideas in his mind, but he doubted he'd find out anything. He had encountered so many dragon nests, big and small, where dragon parents raised their young. It was possible they might have landed just for the eggs to be laid, and after the younglings were born they'd soon be taken away.

He had seen it before, and it certainly made sense.

"But he did manage to tame them? Impressive," Hiccup breathed.

"He needed to offer them food," the abbot went on, "and eventually they accepted him, however, they refused to let them close enough to ride them. Soon, the dragons left, but they had left a major impression on him and on other monks, whom he had persuaded to come and share the experience."

Hiccup snorted. "That must have been an experience for them. So the dragons left, and the monks went off to build the monastery. But what do you do with the dragons?"

"We live with them in peace," the abbot replied simply. "The hospital there," he pointed at the building in question, where Hiccup turned and saw a really large dragon surrounded with a number of robed monks, tending to a damaged wing, "is meant to help the dragons to heal from their injuries, most of which we inflict on them," a brief look of anger crossed the abbot's face as he described the pain caused by humans against the dragons before he cleared his throat, "and they continue to shelter here, and our monks outside of the group assigned to tend to them in the hospital leave them alone, although we are free to meditate in peace here, otherwise we are comfortable with leaving them alone."

Hiccup nodded, but there was still something confusing him. "Why did you have your monks lie badly to me when I woke up?"

The abbot chuckled, the benevolent facade once more masking that shrewd intellect back in force. "At the time, I didn't know it was you. We receive very few visitors, especially since the monastery is in a remote part of this province, and we are self-sufficient without needing too many outside supplies. However, we still receive several visitors, and there are those we need to be careful with, especially when they join our order. They need to be shown dragons are good and kind, not destructive unless they're provoked. We have had many close calls with soldiers over the years, hunters and poachers of dragons who believe parts from a dragon can be used to heal others, but they're fake. For centuries this monastery has only managed to survive because we have taken precautions."

"What happens if they won't listen?" Hiccup asked, unsure if he could believe that given how clumsily the monks assigned to his care after he'd woken up, but he then wondered to himself if the abbot had deliberately assigned a pair of monks whom he knew wouldn't be good at lying through their teeth so then he'd be suspicious of the place. That made little sense, but he knew the abbot knew who he was, and he wondered if the monks wanted something from him. Had they wanted him to be suspicious or that they were kindred spirits?

"Unfortunately, we have sometimes had to silence those same people, through poisons or hallucinogenic plants and herbs, depending on how dangerous they are," the abbot's voice was cold with the facts.

Hiccup's remaining eye widened in horror as his mind conjured an image of a peasant or a soldier who had seen the dragons and had tried to escape, only for the monks to poison him slowly until he died. But he was old and big enough to know sometimes killing was unavoidable, and since the dragons and the monks lived in a utopia here, any outsider would alert the authorities, and then the whole place would be destroyed. So he could see where the monks were coming from, even if a large part of him truly did not like what they needed to do to keep the truth of their order a strict secret.

"And… what do you plan for me?" He asked.

"Oh, don't worry. We don't plan on hurting you. Dear me, no," the abbot chuckled. "You are like us. You care and love dragons, and you could help us."

"I'd love to," Hiccup said, "but I'm trying to return to my own dragon. I flew one here, to China but unfortunately, we were separated when the village we were staying in was attacked, and I'm trying to get back to him."

Hiccup was expecting the abbot to be disappointed, but he was surprised when the abbot just smiled. "You lost your dragon at -." He said the name of the village.

Hiccup nodded. "Yes, that's right."

The abbot gestured with his hand and walked off, the two other monks gesturing for Hiccup to follow. And he did, confused. The abbot led him through the dragons until they went by the small lake (Hiccup was now no longer positive the lake was artificial anymore, but it didn't matter) where dozens of dragons were drinking from/playing/ or laying by.

The abbot was walking towards a large number of boulders when suddenly a large black mass leapt onto the rocks. Hiccup gasped when he saw the dragon, noting the massive bat-like wings, the long tail with the real tail-fin and the artificial tail-fin, and the diamond-shaped head, but it was the toxic-green eyes which made him gasp.

"_TOOTHLESS?"_


	13. Chapter 13

I don't own How to Train Your Dragon in any fashion, but you should be familiar with that by now.

Please let me know what you think.

A/N - The last chapter, however Hiccup the Dragon Pirate will be back soon. The idea is he meets a number of bedraggled soldiers fighting a war against the Huns, but there is one soldier who intrigues him...

* * *

The Dragon Conqueror.

The Night Fury was startled by the volume of the shout, and he bounded over to meet the human who had yelled. He walked over, twisting his body around as he did, crooning curiously as he did. Hiccup stood his ground, remembering how the dragon was with him originally when he made that fish offering. Instead of a fish like that time, however, Hiccup simply held out his palm and turned his head away, wondering why Toothless didn't seem to know him.

He felt and heard a loud sniffing sound, and then he felt a terrific impact to his chest as he was thrown off his feet by a black mass. He landed hard on the ground, but he was only just able to use the yoga and kung-fu moves he had picked up over his travels in India and in China to maintain enough control over his body so the back of his head didn't suddenly smash into the ground, but the impact still knocked some of the air out of his lungs. Suddenly he felt the familiar sensation of Toothless's tongue on his face.

Hiccup grimaced as he instinctively tried to stop the impromptu bath, but even so, he was amazed that he had missed them.

"HEY! Toothless, I'm happy to see you too, bud," he laughed valiantly while trying at the same time to stop the Night Fury from drowning him with his own slobber. "But your slobber doesn't wash out!" The excited Night Fury didn't seem to pay any notice to what he was saying, much to Hiccup's exasperation, but when one of the dragon's paws accidentally pressed down on his bruised chest, Hiccup wasn't able to stop himself from crying out, startling Toothless.

The Night Fury jumped off worriedly, warbling at him while Hiccup stood up, shakily, pressing his hand to his chest. It was still tender; the accident which had taken place on top of that mountain, and the very nasty ride down the rapids had taken their toll, and even with the brief time he'd been convalescent it was still slightly painful and would need time to heal.

"It's okay, bud," Hiccup whispered, holding out a comforting hand out which the Night Fury happily but calmly reciprocated when he pressed his scaly head into his palm, "it's okay. I freed a number of dragons from a warlord who wanted to use them as weapons of war. Unfortunately, one of them knocked me off of a mountain, and down into a fast-moving river, but I'll be fine."

Toothless growled at the mention of other dragons which didn't surprise the dragon rider one little bit. Toothless had always been very jealous whenever they'd encountered another dragon, and he'd managed to tame them. Hiccup had never really understood the reason, but if he had to guess Toothless was worried Hiccup would see the other dragon as the perfect replacement since they weren't crippled like he was. No matter how many times Hiccup had reassured the dragon, Toothless would always be insecure.

In this case, there was another reason. Toothless was like a mother hen, really; every time Hiccup had gotten injured, the dragon would either destroy the source and then he would coddle Hiccup until the dragon got very close to intruding into the dragon rider's personal space. Hiccup only hoped the Night Fury didn't do that here, he was feeling too fragile for the traditional coddling.

"Anyway, how have you been doing here, bud?" He smiled, hoping to move on and knowing now the Night Fury knew he was injured he would be more gentle, and he walked over to the dragon and looked over Toothless' body. The dragon's back was bare without any saddle of any kind, and as he looked over the Night Fury's tail, Hiccup was pleased to see the artificial tail fin was still intact.

"Let me see your tail properly."

The Night Fury warbled and moved around so then his tail-fin would be closer to his rider. Hiccup examined the tail-fin closely and gently. "Hmm, you need it to be tuned up a little bit, buddy, and it could with some oiling. Other than that, it looks great."

Toothless warbled.

"Is that an artificial tail-fin?"

Hiccup looked up startled; he had pretty much forgotten the monks were still present and listening to everything he was saying to Toothless. The dragon, unsurprisingly, didn't look startled; as a predator with highly acute senses Toothless noticed everything around him even if there were dozens of distractions.

Despite being distracted, Hiccup recovered quickly and he nodded with a smile. "Yes, yes it is," he replied proudly, inviting the monks and the abbot to walk closer so they could examine the tail-fin; it was a very small thing, but Hiccup realised that it felt good to show people, any people, what he was good at, and what he could make if he had access to a blacksmith's forge and plenty of materials with which he could work with.

"Incredible," one of the monks whispered in amazement.

"This dragon has been coming and going from the sanctuary of the monastery for a while now," the abbot observed, "we've noticed the dragons, particularly those breeds who aren't native of our lands," he gestured with his hand to a part of the enclosure, "tend to leave him alone, although a few of the dragons who believe in their own ability and prowess try to engage him in a battle. They quickly lost."

Hiccup looked sharply over the Night Fury, and he found Toothless had closed his eyes and he'd raised his head while he tried to look as proud and as regal as possible. He sighed as he turned back to the party near him. "I'm not surprised those dragons knew to leave him alone; the Monstrous Nightmare and the Timberjack are two of the most powerful breeds of dragons in my part of the world," he explained, "and while they might be able to fight Toothless to a standstill, they'd likely lose."

"Monstrous Nightmare?" One of the monks asked in interest.

Hiccup stepped away from Toothless and pointed at the serpentine red and brown dragon with the horns on his head. "That's a Monstrous Nightmare. They have the ability to set fire to themselves safely, so capturing them is very tricky. They're more powerful, more armoured, and more dangerous than other dragons. Back during the Dragon War, Monstrous Nightmares were killed in Kill Rings by the most skilled trainees to prove their skill and to seal their place as Dragon Killers as rites of passage," he added, remembering the dark memory of how his attempt to pacify that Monstrous Nightmare back on Berk had gone horribly wrong.

The abbot noticed something about Hiccup's body language, something off that didn't quite ring true, and the experienced man he was could see the regret in the young man's posture and he wondered what could have taken place. However, the abbot decided not to broach the subject right at that moment; he was planning on inviting the Dragon Rider to his chambers, so then they could enjoy a meal together so they could chat and debate to themselves, while at the same time he could see about persuading the young man to remain at the monastery for a little while so then he could teach the monks more about dragon care.

Many of the dragons who came to the monastery usually arrived with terrible injuries and wounds which usually became infected. It wasn't uncommon for the monks to be overwhelmed by the terrible injuries the dragons usually endured from the hands of their countrymen; sometimes they encountered a dragon who's wings had practically been torn off by razor-netting, and the ones that did usually died or became listless, depressed they'd never be able to fly again. They often came across dragons whose back or front limbs had been torn or ripped off, leaving nothing but bloodied and infected stumps. It had never failed to horrify the abbot with just how far humans were willing to go in order to kill dragons, and it frightened him as well with the lengths they were willing to go.

And he could tell Hiccup was a kindred spirit who clearly hated the violence, but he had never even tried to stop any of it because he knew he was only one voice, just like the monk who had founded the very monastery they were standing in. If there was one thing a life of contemplation and peace had granted the monks, it was the means of stepping out of ordinary human nature whenever they encountered other people, and they often found others wanting. They could see even if the founder of the monastery had tried to persuade others about the truth of the dragons, not everyone would agree, especially those like the warlord whom Hiccup had already met, who would wish for the dragons to serve them as weapons of hate, and machines of war.

The abbot was more than aware of the war between the Vikings and the dragons, and he could see just by looking at the dark, regretful way Hiccup was looking between the black dragon he named 'Toothless' and the one he had referred to as a 'Monstrous Nightmare' he not only regretted the way his fellow Vikings had treated the dragons, but he hated it as well.

"I believe we have much to talk about," the abbot decided to offer the dragon rider the invitation, "I would be delighted if you partook in a meal with myself, and some of the senior monks tonight."

Hiccup was surprised by the offer, although he knew he shouldn't have. "I'd be delighted to," he replied, curious about how the monk's hospitality would change if he accepted the offer. But on the other hand, Hiccup had always enjoyed the hospitality of the various monks and priests he had previously encountered over the years, and he had always enjoyed the talks he had with them and he had always learnt something about them in turn. "However, I'd like some time to be with Toothless again, if that's alright?" He added.

The abbot smiled. "Of course," he replied, wondering to himself if the rider would fly off before he realised Hiccup seemed genuinely interested in attending dinner tonight. "We shall dine at sunset, please do not be late."

"I'll be there," Hiccup clambered onto Toothless' back; the Night Fury realised what he was planning to do, and the dragon was bouncing on his feet, tongue-wagging out while his eyes were wide open in excitement, and he crouched down to give Hiccup a hand. Hiccup slid onto Toothless' back, already making up his mind to make a new saddle for the dragon to replace the old one. Idly he wondered what had happened to it, but he dismissed it.

"You'd better stand back," he said to the monks in warning, and he waited until they'd stepped back before he patted Toothless on the neck, feeling emotion welling up inside him. It had been so long since he and his dragon had gone out for a flight.

"C'mon bud, " he said.

Toothless didn't need any prompting. Crouching down as if he were a giant cat with wings, Toothless spread his wings wide as he jumped into the air, beating the air furiously with his wings before he glided through the air while Hiccup clung to his back and his neck for dear life. "WHOOOA!" He yelled, his voice echoing throughout the enclosure and the monastery grounds and gardens, and around the woods near the monastery.

_Right, that settles it, _Hiccup thought to himself, _I'm definitely making a new saddle for Toothless. _

But despite the rough start, Hiccup actually enjoyed the flight; unlike his first, unexpected flight when Toothless had tested the original tail fin prototype, Toothless was able to control the flight effortlessly. And he was able to do things with his tail fin he had never been able to do when Hiccup had been in control.

With that thought in mind, Hiccup turned his head and studied the artificial tail fin which didn't need his input to make it work effectively. It seemed to be holding up quite nicely, although he definitely planned on working on it to make sure it was in top working condition after its maintenance had been neglected for months.

The duo was in the air for a good few hours. Hiccup had decided to test the limits of the tail fin to gauge its current condition while he enjoyed the moment with his dragon. At the same time, they flew to reconnect with each other. After spending a few hours, Hiccup and Toothless returned to the ground.

It was almost time for dinner.

XXX

Dinner was an interesting affair, and Hiccup was stunned. Apparently word of him taking flight on Toothless' back had received mixed views; some of the monks firmly believed the dragons were meant to have their personal space without humans intruding on them, while others were fascinated and wondered what riding on a dragons' back was like.

However, Hiccup was surprised when the abbot had something to say. "Would you like to stay here at the monastery?"

"You want me to stay, why?"

The abbot smiled. "I believe we have much to learn from each other. The dragons trust you, but I believe this is a unique opportunity for you to learn more about a whole new side to living and interacting with dragons."

Hiccup rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He had to admit the abbot had chosen the right words to describe the offer and it was tempting. From what he had seen so far, the monk's methods of taming and living with dragons involved them using the same basic methods he'd adopted himself, but he was sure there was more to it than that.

"At the same time, you can help us."

Hiccup looked up while the monks looked on and listened. "Oh, how?"

"Many of the dragons who come to our monastery take refuge here because of truly severe injuries, but you developed a means for your dragon to fly again," the abbot said, "you can help us develop the same means."

Hiccup was silent as he took in what the abbot was saying, and he had to admit the abbot had a point. He had briefly visited the hospital the monks had set up in the enclosure for treating the dragons, and while he was impressed he could see for many of the dragons their lives were a misery because they had either been blinded, their wings or tails torn so badly they couldn't fly anymore. Hearing the offer being handed over to him, Hiccup was even more tempted since he had been at the monastery a short time, but he could see they were kindred spirits. The monks hated the dragons being hurt as much as Hiccup did himself.

At the same time, he couldn't leave now anyway; he needed to make a saddle for Toothless, a simpler model compared to the complex ones which were connected to the prosthetic before the current one the Night Fury was sporting, and he needed to do some maintenance on the tail fin anyway.

In the end, there was only one answer he could give. Hiccup nodded. "Alright, I'll stay."


End file.
